Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

Previous studies identified cognitive difficulties in individuals with congenital visual impairment that significantly impacted on wellbeing and educational attainment. However, factors leading to adverse outcome remained unclear. The current study aimed to identify associations and mechanisms of specific cognitive deficits associated with visual impairment from a neurodevelopmental perspective. Based on recent theoretical advances (Johnson, 2011), it was assumed that visual impairment leads to differences in cognition by influencing experience-driven brain maturational processes, which support the integration between cortical areas to support cognitive processes. In order to explore this hypothesis, children with visual impairment due to disorders that were thought to only affect peripheral sensory parts of the visual system were assessed on neuropsychological instruments covering a range of functional domains. Further, structural and functional neurophysiological methods were employed to establish the impact of visual impairment on brain organisation. The results of the present work confirm earlier reports of specific deficits in spatial memory, social understanding, and aspects of executive function, despite typical performance in other domains. In addition, the current study is the first study to indicate dosage-dependence with some aspects of social communication being even impaired in children with only mild to moderate visual impairment, while aspects of executive function and spatial memory were only found to be deficient in children with more severe forms of visual impairment. Further, neurophysiological investigations indicated differences in structural and functional brain organisation in children with VI that related to differences in behavioural performance. In general, the results of the present study suggest that visual sensory impairment impacts on brain and cognitive development with important implications for education and clinical treatment of children with visual impairment.

Recent research into the nature of self in artificial and biological systems raises interest in a uniquely determining immutable sense of self, a "metaphysical 'I'" associated with inviolable personal values and moral convictions that remain constant in the face of environmental change, distinguished from an object “me” that changes with its environment. Complementary research portrays processes associated with self as multimodal routines selectively enacted on the basis of contextual cues informing predictive self or world models, with the notion of the constant, pervasive and invariant sense of self associated with a multistable attractor set aiming to ensure personal integrity against threat of disintegrative change. This paper proposes that an immutable sense of self emerges as a global attractor which can be described as a project ideal self-situation embodied in frontal medial processes during more or less normal adolescent development, and that thereafter serves to orient agency in the more or less free development of embodied potentials over the life course in effort to realize project conditions, phenomenally identified with the felt pull towards this end as purpose of and source of meaning in life. So oriented, life-long self-development aims to embody solutions to problems at different timescales depending on this embodied purpose, ultimately in the service of evolutionary processes securing organism populations against threats of disintegrative change over timespans far beyond that of the individual. After characterizing the target sense of self, research circling this target is briefly surveyed. Self as global project and developmental neural correlates are proposed. Then, the paper discusses some implications for research in biological and artificial systems. Building from earlier work in cognitive neurorobotics, discussion affirms the value of reinforcement rituals including prayer in metaphysical self-development, considers implications for value alignment and rights associated with free will in the context of artificial intelligence and robot religion, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of self-development toward project ideals as source of meaning in life in the current social-political environment.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the neural mechanisms underlying altered emotional processes in children and adolescents with psychopathology. This review provides a brief overview of the most up-to-date findings in the field of event-related potentials (ERPs) to facial and vocal emotional expressions in the most common child psychopathological conditions. In regards to externalizing behavior (i.e., ADHD, CD), ERP studies show enhanced early components to anger, reflecting enhanced sensory processing, followed by reductions in later components to anger, reflecting reduced cognitive-evaluative processing. In regards to internalizing behavior, research supports models of increased processing of threat stimuli especially at later more elaborate and effortful stages. Finally, in autism spectrum disorders abnormalities have been observed at early visual-perceptual stages of processing. An affective neuroscience framework for understanding child psychopathology can be valuable in elucidating underlying mechanisms and inform preventive intervention.

There have been rapid advances in understanding a broad range of changes in brain structure and function during adolescence, and a growing interest in identifying which of these neurodevelopmental changes are directly linked with pubertal maturation—at least in part because of their potential to provide insights into the numerous emotional and behavioral health problems that emerge during this developmental period. This review focuses on what is known about the influence of puberty on white matter development in adolescence.We focus on white matter because of its role in providing the structural architectural organization of the brain and as a structural correlate of communication within complex neural systems. We begin with a review of studies that report sex differences or sex by age interactions in white matter development as these findings can provide, although indirectly,information relevant to puberty-related changes. Studies are also critically reviewed based on methodologica...

Baddeley and Hitch's multi-component working memory (WM) model has played an enduring and influential role in our understanding of cognitive abilities. Very little is known, however, about the neural basis of this multi-component WM model and the differential role each component plays in mediating arithmetic problem solving abilities in children. Here, we investigate the neural basis of the central executive (CE), phonological (PL) and visuo-spatial (VS) components of WM during a demanding mental arithmetic task in 7-9 year old children (N=74). The VS component was the strongest predictor of math ability in children and was associated with increased arithmetic complexity-related responses in left dorsolateral and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortices as well as bilateral intra-parietal sulcus and supramarginal gyrus in posterior parietal cortex. Critically, VS, CE and PL abilities were associated with largely distinct patterns of brain response. Overlap between VS and CE compo...

The transition from late adolescence to young adulthood is often overlooked in the cognitive neuroscience literature. However this is an important developmental period as even older adolescents have not yet reached adult level ability on many cognitive tasks. Adolescents (16-17-year olds) and young adults (23-30-year olds) were tested on a cued task switching paradigm specifically designed to isolate response preparation from response execution. A combined ERP and eletromyographic (EMG) investigation revealed that adolescents have attenuated contingent negative variation (CNV) activity during response preparation followed by larger P3b amplitude and EMG activity in the incorrect response hand during response execution. This is consistent with deficient response preparation and a reactive control strategy. Conversely young adults engaged increased response preparation followed by attenuated P3b activity and early EMG activity in the correct response hand during response execution whi...

How do human children come to understand the actions of other people? What neural systems are associated with the processing of others' actions and how do these systems develop, starting in infancy? These questions span cognitive psychology and developmental cognitive neuroscience, and addressing them has important implications for the study of social cognition. A large amount of research has used behavioral measures to investigate infants' imitation of the actions of other people; a related but smaller literature has begun to use neurobiological measures to study of infants' action representation. Here we focus on experiments employing electroencephalographic (EEG) techniques for assessing mu rhythm desynchronization in infancy, and analyze how this work illuminates the links between action perception and production prior to the onset of language.

Introduction: In research, a simple measure of general cognitive ability is often required. One method is the Matrix Matching Test, a brief, free-to-use, language-free assessment of general cognitive ability or intelligence in adults, which taps both fluid and crystalized processes. We investigated its reliability and validity with adolescent participants. Methods: The Matrix Matching Test was administered to 111 participants, aged 12 to 17 (46% female). Subsamples also completed two standard measures of cognitive ability: Vocabulary (crystalized) and Matrix Reasoning (fluid) tests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children IV (WISC-IV). Results: The Matrix Matching Test was found to have acceptable internal consistency and good retest reliability. Criterion validity was indicated by its ability to distinguish between psychosocially deprived participants living in foster care (n = 40) and controls, and by its positive correlation with grade point average. There were large positive correlations between the Matrix Matching Test and the standard measures of Vocabulary, and Matrix Reasoning, suggesting convergent validity. Conclusions: Our preliminary evidence suggests that The Matrix Matching Test is a reliable and valid measure of general cognitive ability for ages 12 to 17.

The world is cluttered with more information than can be processed at once. Attention is defined as a process or computation that is applied to competing environmental information, the result of which is to bias selection and action to one option while simul‑ taneously filtering interference from the remaining alternatives 1–4. Framing attention as a computation is useful because it explains how attention processes can be carried out on a range of sensory inputs, as well as on more‑abstract representations. For exam‑ ple, visual attention can bias selection of information about objects, such as particular features or locations. Attention can also act to select goals for action from the contents of working memory. In all these cases, attention processes determine what information is selected for subsequent perception, action, learning and memory, imposing a crucial processing bottleneck. It is there‑ fore one of the most‑studied mechanisms in the adult cognitive neurosciences. However, a complete understanding of attention processes must also include an understanding of their developmental origins. In this Review, we highlight how studying developing rather than developed attentional states broadens our understanding of attention mecha‑ nisms and forces a shift in focus from considering atten‑ tion as an isolated process towards an understanding of its links with perception and memory, as well as its genetic constraints and malleability. We discuss studies of typical development of attention processes and stud‑ ies of neurodevelopmental disorders in which attention processes are atypical. It is important to note that atten‑ tion operates in various sensory modalities. Here, we focus largely on cortical mechanisms of visual atten‑ tion development, but we suggest that the processes and approaches discussed here may operate in a similar way across other sensory modalities. Finally, we propose novel ideas for successful training of attention during development.

Positive social interactions are essential for emotional well-being, healthy development, establishment and maintenance of adequate social structures and reproductive success of humans and animals. Here, we review the studies that have investigated whether forms of social interaction that occur in different phases of the lifespan of animals, i.e., maternal behavior, social play and sexual interaction are rewarding in rodents and non-human primates. We show that these three forms of social interaction can be used as incentive for place conditioning, lever pressing and maze learning, three setups that have been extensively used to study the rewarding properties of food and drugs of abuse and their neural underpinnings. The experience of positive social interactions during key developmental ages has profound and long-lasting effects on brain function and behavior in emotional, motivational and cognitive domains. For instance, pup interaction is more rewarding than cocaine for early pos...

Recent neuroscience models of adolescent brain development attribute the morbidity and mortality of this period to structural and functional imbalances between more fully developed limbic regions that subserve reward and emotion as opposed to those that enable cognitive control. We challenge this interpretation of adolescent development by distinguishing risk-taking that peaks during adolescence (sensation seeking and impulsive action) from risk taking that declines monotonically from childhood to adulthood (impulsive choice and other decisions under known risk). Sensation seeking is primarily motivated by exploration of the environment under ambiguous risk contexts, while impulsive action, which is likely to be maladaptive, is more characteristic of a subset of youth with weak control over limbic motivation. Risk taking that declines monotonically from childhood to adulthood occurs primarily under conditions of known risks and reflects increases in executive function as well as ave...

From Piaget's cognitive developmental theory to the embodied cognition perspective, there is a consensus among researchers that motor development and skills are intertwined with cognitive development. During the past decade, there has been an increasing interest among the academic world to further examine this relationship and determine the extent to which it is significant. The aim of this paper is to combine and present all the latest data from studies investigating the relationship between gross motor skills and executive functions (EFs) in children 1-15 years old. The results illustrated in the latest available research data indicate that the correlation between these two concepts can vary from weak to strong, depending on the sample (age, abilities, and skills), and the tool for measuring EFs. However, a stronger and more consistent correlation is illustrated between EFs and more complex motor skills. The authors of the article suggest a further investigation of the relationship between EFs and motor skills of the under-researched cohort of children three-to-five years old, as well as the development of appropriate assessment methods for EFs in preschool-aged children in Greece. Thus, in the future it will be more feasible to develop and assess the effectiveness of intervention programmes that will be oriented towards-but not limited to-utilising motor activities as a way of enhancing both the motor development and executive functioning of children.

Touch is one of the first senses to develop and one of the earliest modalities for infant-caregiver communication. While studies have explored the benefits of infant touch in terms of physical health and growth, the effects of social touch on infant behavior are relatively unexplored. Here, we investigated the influence of neonatal handling on a variety of domains, including memory, novelty seeking, and social interest, in infant monkeys (Macaca mulatta; n=48) from 2 to 12 weeks of age. Neonates were randomly assigned to receive extra holding, with or without accompanying face-to-face interactions. Extra-handled infants, compared to standard-reared infants, exhibited less stress-related behavior and more locomotion around a novel environment, faster approach of novel objects, better working memory, and less fear towards a novel social partner. In sum, infants who received more tactile stimulation in the neonatal period subsequently demonstrated more advanced motor, social, and cogni...