Developmental cognitive neurosciecne: Functional connectomics agenda for human brain lifespan development

Abstract

Tremendous advances in brain science and neuroimaging technology mark the progression of developmental cognitive neuroscience (DCN). An interdisciplinary field that incorporates psychology and neuroscience, DCN plays an increasingly important role in revealing mind-brain-behavior association, in which the brain connectome of lifespan development may deeply parse the underlying mechanism between micro (molecular and hormone) levels and macro (psychological and behavioral) levels. This is of paramount importance for our understanding of the neural basis of the human lifespan development process. To elucidate the mind-brain-behavior association, several brain developmental imaging initiatives were implemented recently. Some detailed profiles of these projects were also elucidated. Herein, we introduce the latest DCN progress and the lifespan characteristics, as well as their behavioral correlates. Regarding the developmental characteristics of both brain structure and function, compelling evidence indicated four main stages with specific neural features. Specifically, in fetal brains, gradients from both medial to lateral and from forward to backward were observable, whereas the brain weakens its connectivity between homologous cortical regions when age reaches childhood. Adolescents exhibit stronger cortical-subcortical connectivity, echoing their strengthened self-consciousness and an important time window for developing emotion regulation. As a relatively stable stage, adults show a steady trajectory, but this stable trend can be modulated through cognitive training or innervation. As the brain ages, humans experience age-related cognitive decline, with decreases of functional connectivity. Beyond these changes occurring at different states of the human life span, we further discussed both the feasibility and the necessity of envisioning the construction of normative brain lifespan developmental trajectories for applications. With the advances in large-scale lifespan neuroimaging datasets shared with the public, this construction is becoming possible and will be of great value in the early detection of brain-related psychopathological changes and the guidance of diagnostic processes, as well as decisions regarding treatment selection and the effectiveness of clinical therapy. In China, several large-scale cognitive/ behavior and neuroimaging longitudinal studies have been funded. For example, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) funded the Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP) in 2012 to construct a draft version of the normative trajectory of Chinese brains. The CCNP includes three waves (with a 15-month interval) of multimodal neuroimaging data from 192 participants (6–18 years old) with both psychological and behavioral assessments. To summarize, growing evidence demonstrates that brain connectomics is becoming a fundamental framework of various important brain initiatives with a lifespan developmental perspective. This connectome agenda will play a critical role in parsing the relationship between brain function and behavior performance across the human lifespan. With the advances in both data-sharing and brain research, the normative lifespan trajectories of the human brain will be modeled and mapped out in the future.