Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Lasting effects of stress physiology on the brain: Cortisol reactivity during preschool predicts hippocampal functional connectivity at school age
Publication date: Available online 14 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Sarah L. Blankenship, Morgan Botdorf, Tracy Riggins, Lea R. DoughertyAbstractProlonged exposure to glucocorticoid stress hormones, such as cortisol in humans, has been associated with structural and functional changes in the hippocampus. The majority of research demonstrating these associations in humans has been conducted in adult, clinical, or severely maltreated populations, with little research investigating these effects in young or more typically developing populations. The present study sought to address this ga...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 15, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Modeling the Evolution of Sensitive Periods
Publication date: Available online 12 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Willem E. Frankenhuis, Nicole WalasekAbstractIn the past decade, there has been monumental progress in our understanding of the neurobiological basis of sensitive periods. Little is known, however, about the evolution of sensitive periods. Recent studies have started to address this gap. Biologists have built mathematical models exploring the environmental conditions in which sensitive periods are likely to evolve. These models investigate how mechanisms of plasticity can respond optimally to experience during an indiv...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 13, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Temporo-frontal activation during phonological processing predicts gains in arithmetic facts in young children
This study suggests that both temporal and frontal cortex activation during phonological processing are important in predicting gains in math tasks that involve the retrieval of facts that are stored as phonological codes in memory. Moreover, these results were specific to younger children, suggesting that phonology is most important in the early stages of math development. When the math task involved subtractions, which relies on quantity representations, phonological processes were not important in driving gains. (Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience)
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 12, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Distinct aspects of the early environment shape associative memory, cued attention, and memory-guided attention: Implications for academic achievement
Publication date: Available online 6 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Maya L. Rosen, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Margaret A. Sheridan, Katie A. McLaughlinAbstractChildhood socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with numerous aspects of cognitive development and disparities in academic achievement. The specific environmental factors that contribute to these disparities remain poorly understood. We used observational methods to characterize three aspects of the early environment that may contribute to SES-related differences in cognitive development: violence exposure, cognitive stimulation, and ...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 8, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Reinforcement learning across development: What insights can we draw from a decade of research?
Publication date: Available online 6 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Kate Nussenbaum, Catherine A. HartleyAbstractThe past decade has seen the emergence of the use of reinforcement learning models to study developmental change in value-based learning. It is unclear, however, whether these computational modeling studies, which have employed a wide variety of tasks and model variants, have reached convergent conclusions. In this review, we examine whether the tuning of model parameters that govern different aspects of learning and decision-making processes vary consistently as a function o...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 8, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Prosocial behavior relates to the rate and timing of cortical thinning from adolescence to young adulthood
This study showed that prosocial behavior is associated with regional development of cortical thickness in adolescence and young adulthood. The results suggest that the rate of thinning in these regions, as well as its timing, may be factors related to prosocial behavior. (Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience)
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 8, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Neurodevelopmental shifts in learned value transfer on cognitive control during adolescence
Publication date: Available online 6 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Catherine Insel, Mia Charifson, Leah H. SomervilleAbstractValue-associated cues in the environment often enhance subsequent goal-directed behaviors in adults, a phenomenon supported by integration of motivational and cognitive neural systems. Given the interactions among these systems change throughout adolescence, we tested when beneficial effects of value associations on subsequent cognitive control performance emerge during adolescence. Participants (N = 81) aged 13-20 completed a reinforcement learning task with...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 8, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Combined effects of age and BMI are related to altered cortical thickness in adolescence and adulthood
Publication date: Available online 5 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Margaret L. Westwater, Raquel Vilar-López, Hisham Ziauddeen, Antonio Verdejo-García, Paul C. FletcherAbstractOverweight and obesity are associated with functional and structural alterations in the brain, but how these associations change across critical developmental periods remains unknown. Here, we examined the relationship between age, body mass index (BMI) and cortical thickness (CT) in healthy adolescents (n = 70; 14 – 19 y) and adults (n = 75; 25 – 45 y). We also examined the relationship between adi...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 6, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

The relationship between performance in a theory of mind task and intrinsic functional connectivity in youth with early onset psychosis
Publication date: Available online 5 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Daniel Ilzarbe, Elena de la Serna, Inmaculada Baeza, Mireia Rosa, Olga Puig, Anna Calvo, Mireia Masias, Roger Borras, Jose C. Pariente, Josefina Castro-Fornieles J, Gisela SugranyesAbstractPsychotic disorders are characterized by theory of mind (ToM) impairment. Although ToM undergoes maturational changes throughout adolescence, there is a lack of studies examining ToM performance and its brain functional correlates in individuals with an early onset of psychosis (EOP; onset prior to age 18), and its relationship with a...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 6, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Always on my mind: Cross-brain associations of mental health symptoms during simultaneous parent-child scanning
Publication date: Available online 5 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Kelly T. Cosgrove, Kara L. Kerr, Robin L. Aupperle, Erin L. Ratliff, Danielle C. DeVille, Jennifer S. Silk, Kaiping Burrows, Andrew J. Moore, Chase Antonacci, Masaya Misaki, Susan F. Tapert, Jerzy Bodurka, W. Kyle Simmons, Amanda Sheffield MorrisAbstractHow parents manifest symptoms of anxiety or depression may affect how children learn to modulate their own distress, thereby influencing the children's risk for developing an anxiety or mood disorder. Conversely, children’s mental health symptoms may impact parents' ex...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 6, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Altered neural correlates of episodic memory in adolescents with severe obesity
Publication date: Available online 6 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Alaina L Pearce, Eleanor Mackey, J. Bradley C. Cherry, Alexandra Olson, Xiaozhen You, Evan P Nadler, Chandan J VaidyaAbstractNegative effects of obesity on memory and associated medial temporal circuitry have been noted in animal models, but the status in humans, particularly children, is not well established. Our study is the first to examine neural correlates of successful memory encoding of visual scenes and their associated context in adolescents with severe obesity (age 14-18 years, 43% male). Despite similar subse...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 6, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Corticosterone administration targeting a hypo-reactive HPA axis rescues a socially-avoidant phenotype in scarcity-adversity reared rats
This study utilized a rodent model of “scarcity-adversity,” which encompasses material resource deprivation (scarcity) and reduced caregiving quality (adversity), to explore how early-life scarcity-adversity causally influences social behavior via disruption of developing stress physiology. Results showed that early-life scarcity-adversity exposure increased social avoidance when offspring were tested in a social approach test in peri-adolescence. Furthermore, early-life scarcity-adversity led to blunted hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activity as measured via adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticoste...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 6, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Longitudinal Link between Trait Motivation and Risk-Taking Behaviors via Neural Risk Processing
Publication date: Available online 3 November 2019Source: Developmental Cognitive NeuroscienceAuthor(s): Mengjiao Li, Nina Lauharatanahirun, Laurence Steinberg, Brooks King-Casas, Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, Kirby Deater-DeckardAbstractPrior research has emphasized the importance of the motivational system in risky decision-making, yet the mechanisms through which individual differences in motivation may influence adolescents’ risk-taking behaviors remain to be determined. Based on developmental neuroscience literature illustrating the importance of risk processing in explaining individual differences in value-based decision mak...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 5, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Deficits in arithmetic error detection in infants with prenatal alcohol exposure: an ERP study
We report ERP data collected from 32 infants (mean age = 6.8 mo; SD = 0.6; range = 6.1-8.1; 16 typically-developing (TD); 16 prenatally alcohol-exposed) during a task designed to assess error detection. Evidence of error monitoring at this early age suggests that precursors of the onset of executive control can already be detected in infancy. As predicted, the ERPs of the TD infants, time-locked to the presentation of the solution to simple arithmetic equations, showed greater negative activity for the incorrect solution condition at middle-frontal scalp areas. Spectral analysis indicated specificity to the 6-7...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - November 3, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research

Observed Infant-Parent Attachment and Brain Morphology in Middle Childhood– A Population-Based Study
We examined the association between infant-parent attachment and brain morphology in 551 children from a population-based cohort in the Netherlands. Infant-parent attachment was observed with the Strange-Situation Procedure at age 14 months and different brain measures were collected with magnetic resonance imaging at mean age 10 years.Children with disorganized infant attachment had larger hippocampal volumes than those with organized attachment patterns. This finding was robust to the adjustment for confounders and consistent across hemispheres. The association was not explained by cognitive or emotional and behavioral p...
Source: Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience - October 27, 2019 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research