Field Of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Research Articles

Getting closer to social interactions using electroencephalography in developmental cognitive neuroscience

The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is advancing rapidly, with large-scale, population-wide, longitudinal studies emerging as a key means of unraveling the complexity of the developing brain and cognitive processes in children. While numerous neuroscientific techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have proved advantageous in such investigations, this perspective proposes a renewed focus on electroencephalography (EEG), leveraging underexplored possibilities of EEG. In addition to its temporal precision, low costs, and ease of application, EEG distinguishes itself with its ability to capture neural activity linked to social interactions in increasingly ecologically valid settings. Specifically, EEG can be measured during social interactions in the lab, hyperscanning can be used to study brain activity in two (or more) people simultaneously, and mobile EEG can be used to measure brain activity in real-life settings. This perspective paper summarizes research in these three areas, making a persuasive argument for the renewed inclusion of EEG into the toolkit of developmental cognitive and social neuroscientists.

A Neuroecosocial Perspective on Adolescent Development

Adolescence is a period of life that encompasses biological maturation and profound change in social roles. It is also a period associated with the onset of mental health problems. The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has advanced our understanding of the development of the brain within its immediate social and cultural context. In a time of rising rates of mental health problems among adolescents across the globe, it is important to understand how the wider societal, structural, and cultural contexts of young people are impacting their biological and social-cognitive maturation. In this article, we review the landscape of youth mental health and brain development during adolescence and consider the potential role of brain research in understanding the effects of current social determinants of adolescent mental health, including socioeconomic inequality, city living, and eco-anxiety about the climate crisis.

Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions: BJ Casey.

The Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. The 2022 recipients of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2021 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2021 Committee on Scientific Awards. For her outstanding contributions to human brain development theory and assessment. BJ Casey's efforts and insights have helped launch the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. Her pioneering work showed that the development of self-control is paralleled by differential maturation of the prefrontal cortex and subcortical neurobiology. This research revolutionized theories of how cognitive control, impulsivity, and emotion regulation change during adolescence. She provides translation from research in animal models and humans to policy, including neuroscientifically informed reforms of the juvenile justice system and mental health policy. She has been a pioneer in her scholarship, innovation, and dedication to the next generation of scholars. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

A practical guide for researchers and reviewers using the ABCD Study and other large longitudinal datasets

As the largest longitudinal study of adolescent brain development and behavior to date, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® has provided immense opportunities for researchers across disciplines since its first data release in 2018. The size and scope of the study also present a number of hurdles, which range from becoming familiar with the study design and data structure to employing rigorous and reproducible analyses. The current paper is intended as a guide for researchers and reviewers working with ABCD data, highlighting the features of the data (and the strengths and limitations therein) as well as relevant analytical and methodological considerations. Additionally, we explore justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts as they pertain to the ABCD Study and other large-scale datasets. In doing so, we hope to increase both accessibility of the ABCD Study and transparency within the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.

A Commentary on Whitall and Colleagues’ 2020 Article “Motor Development Research: II. The First Two Decades of the 21st Century Shaping Our Future”

This commentary reflects on the discussions of Whitall et al.’s paper “Motor Development Research: II. The First Two Decades of the 21st Century Shaping Our Future.” Comments focus on (a) the emergence and importance of the Developmental Systems approach to motor development, (b) the perceived ambiguity between Dynamic and Developmental Systems approaches, and (c) a case for the evolution of Developmental Motor Neuroscience from the field of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Adolescent Health Series: Adolescent neurocognitive development in Western and Sub-Saharan African contexts.

The transitional period of adolescence has long been associated with physical, social and behavioural change. During this time, adolescents start to develop their own self-identity, make important life decisions and acquire the necessary skills to successfully transition to adulthood. More recently, advances in brain imaging technology have enabled increased understanding of structural and functional changes in the human brain during this developmental period, and how they relate to social, emotional, motivational and cognitive development. The ability to integrate these developing cognitive processes in increasingly complex social contexts is a key aspect of mature decision-making, which has implications for adolescent health, educational, economic and social outcomes. Insights from the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience could increase our understanding of this influential stage of life and thus inform potential interventions to promote adolescent health, a critical goal for global health research. Many social changes occur during adolescence and the social environment shapes both brain and cognitive development and the decisions adolescents make. Thus, it is important to study adolescent neurocognitive development in socio-cultural context. Yet, despite evidence from Western studies that socio-cultural and economic factors impact on adolescent neurocognitive development, existing studies of adolescent neurocognitive development in sub-Saharan Africa are relatively scarce. We summarise research findings from Western and sub-Saharan African contexts and highlight areas where research is lacking. Longitudinal studies from more diverse global samples will be needed to build a comprehensive model of adolescent development, that characterises both commonalities in developmental trajectories, as well as the way these can meaningfully differ between both individuals and contexts.

Opportunities for increased reproducibility and replicability of developmental neuroimaging

Many workflows and tools that aim to increase the reproducibility and replicability of research findings have been suggested. In this review, we discuss the opportunities that these efforts offer for the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, in particular developmental neuroimaging. We focus on issues broadly related to statistical power and to flexibility and transparency in data analyses. Critical considerations relating to statistical power include challenges in recruitment and testing of young populations, how to increase the value of studies with small samples, and the opportunities and challenges related to working with large-scale datasets. Developmental studies involve challenges such as choices about age groupings, lifespan modelling, analyses of longitudinal changes, and data that can be processed and analyzed in a multitude of ways. Flexibility in data acquisition, analyses and description may thereby greatly impact results. We discuss methods for improving transparency in developmental neuroimaging, and how preregistration can improve methodological rigor. While outlining challenges and issues that may arise before, during, and after data collection, solutions and resources are highlighted aiding to overcome some of these. Since the number of useful tools and techniques is ever-growing, we highlight the fact that many practices can be implemented stepwise.

Toward Realizing the Promise of Educational Neuroscience: Improving Experimental Design in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Studies

This review presents a critical appraisal of high-quality studies in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, focusing on design issues that are critical for establishing effective educational neuroscience. I argue that cognitive neuroscience studies of cognitive development need to respect important experimental constraints. The use of longitudinal and intervention designs is key. The field needs to move beyond simply studying patterns of brain activation to studying brain mechanisms of information encoding and information processing. Indeed, studies at multiple levels of description are required, combining the assessment of individual differences in neural learning, sensory processing, cognitive processing, and children's behavior. Current evidence suggests that the child brain has essentially the same structures as the adult brain, carrying out essentially the same functions via the same mechanisms. This review demonstrates that neural systems that learn the patterns or regularities in environmental input (via statistical learning) can, in principle, acquire complex cognitive structures like language and conceptual knowledge.

Why a developmental cognitive neuroscience approach may be key for future-proofing microbiota-gut-brain research

Abstract Here we argue that a multidisciplinary research approach, such as currently practised in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, is key to maintaining current momentum and to future-proof the field of microbiome-gut-brain research. Moreover, such a comprehensive approach will also bring us closer to our aims of translation and targeted intervention approaches to improve mental health and well-being.

Application of fNIRS in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience : Imaging the typically and atypically developing brains

Application of fNIRS in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience : Imaging the typically and atypically developing brains

Multiscale Modeling of Gene-Behavior Associations in an Artificial Neural Network Model of Cognitive Development.

In the multidisciplinary field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, statistical associations between levels of description play an increasingly important role. One example of such associations is the observation of correlations between relatively common gene variants and individual differences in behavior. It is perhaps surprising that such associations can be detected despite the remoteness of these levels of description, and the fact that behavior is the outcome of an extended developmental process involving interaction of the whole organism with a variable environment. Given that they have been detected, how do such associations inform cognitive-level theories? To investigate this question, we employed a multiscale computational model of development, using a sample domain drawn from the field of language acquisition. The model comprised an artificial neural network model of past-tense acquisition trained using the backpropagation learning algorithm, extended to incorporate population modeling and genetic algorithms. It included five levels of description-four internal: genetic, network, neurocomputation, behavior; and one external: environment. Since the mechanistic assumptions of the model were known and its operation was relatively transparent, we could evaluate whether cross-level associations gave an accurate picture of causal processes. We established that associations could be detected between artificial genes and behavioral variation, even under polygenic assumptions of a many-to-one relationship between genes and neurocomputational parameters, and when an experience-dependent developmental process interceded between the action of genes and the emergence of behavior. We evaluated these associations with respect to their specificity (to different behaviors, to function vs. structure), to their developmental stability, and to their replicability, as well as considering issues of missing heritability and gene-environment interactions. We argue that gene-behavior associations can inform cognitive theory with respect to effect size, specificity, and timing. The model demonstrates a means by which researchers can undertake multiscale modeling with respect to cognition and develop highly specific and complex hypotheses across multiple levels of description.

Commentary: Becoming social--a commentary on Happé & Frith (2014).

The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is now established as a discipline at the nexus of the broader fields of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Sitting in its rear view mirror, but gaining rapidly, is the nascent discipline of developmental social neuroscience. Given the relative youth of this field, it is not surprising that a great deal of energy has gone into generating a rich corpus of empirical data.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy studies in children

Psychosomatic and developmental behavioral medicine in pediatrics has been the subject of significant recent attention, with infants, school-age children, and adolescents frequently presenting with psychosomatic, behavioral, and psychiatric symptoms. These may be a consequence of insecurity of attachment, reduced self-confidence, and peer -relationship conflicts during their developmental stages. Developmental cognitive neuroscience has revealed significant associations between specific brain lesions and particular cognitive dysfunctions. Thus, identifying the biological deficits underlying such cognitive dysfunction may provide new insights into therapeutic prospects for the management of those symptoms in children. Recent advances in noninvasive neuroimaging techniques, and especially functional near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), have contributed significant findings to the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience in pediatrics. We present here a comprehensive review of functional NIRS studies of children who have developed normally and of children with psychosomatic and behavioral disorders.

The Developing Human Brain: A Frontiers Research Topic

The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience (DCN) examines how the human brain and behavior change over the lifespan, in particular over infancy, childhood, and adolescence. DCN researchers conduct basic research on typical brain development, and/or research on pediatric populations with neurodevelopmental disorders. Developmental cognitive neuroscience is not child's play – it is a complex and challenging, but exciting, area of research. It is highly multidisciplinary, in that it builds on the fields of developmental, cognitive, affective/social, and clinical psychology and neuroscience. DCN research also relies on advances in computer science, physics, and mathematics. Increasingly, as we learn more about the developing human brain, findings from DCN have strong implications for medicine, education, law, public health, and social welfare. The story of this compendium begins with a highly successful conference on neurocognitive development held at UC Berkeley in 2009 – a 3-day event with over 200 attendees and over 60 scientific presentations from around the United States and Europe. I thank Brian Meyer, a graduate student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, for helping me to organize this conference. Following on the heels of this conference, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elizabeth O'Hare and I solicited submissions to a special issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience focused on the developing human brain. Dr. O'Hare deserves my gratitude for helping to handle the peer review of these submissions. This Research Topic includes a selection of empirical and review papers from top DCN researchers, organized into six interrelated sections. Section I examines how our visual and auditory systems develop to support the perception of complex stimuli. Recent DCN research highlights the point that, contrary to common belief, perceptual development is not complete after the first few years of life. Face processing – both the recognition of individuals and of specific emotions – is a particularly challenging problem for the visual system, and continues to improve through adolescence. Section II extends the theme of Section I by exploring in more detail the perception of faces, which is critical for social functioning. This section ends with the exploration of deficits in social functioning after pediatric brain injury, which serves as a bridge from studies of perception to studies of action. Section III examines two key neural changes that underlie shifts in behavior over development. The first is a change in the processing of rewards and feedback, which are powerful motivators of behavior. The second is a change in the ability to control behavioral responses, known as cognitive control or executive function, or more generally as self-regulation. Developmental cognitive neuroscience researchers have begun to use sophisticated network analysis tools to examine developmental changes in the strength of interactions between brain regions in large-scale networks. Section IV explores how these brain networks are influenced by common genetic variation or by the presence of a disorder with a strong hereditary component. Section V features a relatively new area of research within DCN: the exploration of societal influences on brain development. Two of the papers in this section compare neurocognitive function in children from North American and Chinese families. The other two papers review what is known currently about the influences of childhood adversity and socioeconomic status on brain development. Finally, Section VI showcases several new ways of thinking about, and studying, the developing human brain. The first paper is an opinion piece highlighting the relevance to DCN of research at the level of neural circuits. The second paper shows how we can go beyond conventional fMRI imaging analyses to examine changes in brain function at a finer grain using multivariate pattern classification algorithms. In conclusion, this compendium shows us both where the field of DCN is currently, and where it is headed. The advances over the last few years have been breathtaking – and the best is yet to come.

Developmental cognitive neuroscience: Origins, issues, and prospects

This commentary explains how the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience (DCN) holds the promise of a much wider interdisciplinary integration across sciences concerned with development: psychology, molecular genetics, neurobiology, and evolutionary developmental biology. First we present a brief history of DCN, including the key theoretical issues it addresses; then we comment on how the four articles in this special section exemplify a DCN approach and raise important theoretical and methodological issues for the field of DCN; and we close by considering the future of DCN, especially the key role developmental psychologists can play as DCN becomes increasingly interdisciplinary.

Educating executive attention

Researchers in the newly emerging field of developmental cognitive neuroscience seek to understand how postnatal brain development relates to changes in perceptual, cognitive, and social abilities in infants and children (1). One of the areas of cognitive development that has benefited most from a developmental cognitive neuroscience approach is attention. The ability to attend to individual objects, people, and spatial locations within our complex and varied sensory environment is fundamental to human cognition. One important aspect of attention, so-called executive attention, refers to our ability to regulate our responses, particularly in conflict situations where several responses are possible. This aspect of attention is thought to develop until early adulthood but seems to undergo a particularly rapid development between 2 and 7 years of age (2, 3), and problems with this function as well as other executive functions may underlie some of the difficulties observed in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (4). In this issue of PNAS, Rueda et al. (5) present a study that elucidates several aspects of executive attention in young children. In their work, they have gathered measures of brain activity, cognition, and behavior in children aged 4 and 6 years. These measures include behavioral assessments of executive attention and intelligence, genotyping of a dopamine-related gene (DAT1), recording electrical activity at the scalp generated by neuronal function (ERPs), and parental questionnaires relating to the child's temperament. For each age group, half of the participants received a specific educational intervention designed to enhance executive attention. This training program, adapted to be child-friendly from a method originally used to prepare macaque monkeys for space travel, was given for 5 days over a 2- to 3-week period. Rueda et al. (5) build on previous work showing that executive attention has a specific developmental course and strong genetic associations. For …

The developmental cognitive neuroscience approach to the study of developmental disorders

Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies of developmental disorders and normal cognition that include children are becoming increasingly common and represent part of a newly expanding field of developmental cognitive neuroscience. These studies have illustrated the importance of the process of development in understanding brain mechanisms underlying cognition and including children in the study of the etiology of developmental disorders.