The development of neural inhibition across species: insights from the Hurst exponent.

The maturation of inhibitory neurons is crucial for regulating plasticity in developing brains. Previous work has suggested that the Hurst exponent, the measure of autocorrelation in time series, reflects inhibition, but empirical data supporting this link is sparse. Here, we demonstrate significant spatial correlations between the Hurst exponent and ex vivo parvalbumin inhibitory mRNA expression in human children and adults, as well as between the Hurst exponent and parvalbumin-positive cell counts in mice, across both sexes.

Structure-function coupling in the first month of life: Associations with age and attention.

How brain structure relates to function is a critical and open question in neuroscience. Here, we characterize regional variation in structure-function coupling, capturing the degree to which a cortical region's structural connections relate to patterns of coordinated neural activity in healthy, term-born neonates ( = 239). Regional structure-function coupling is heterogeneously patterned across the cortex, with higher coupling in the auditory, lateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal cortices.

Prenatal social disadvantage is associated with alterations in functional networks at birth.

Childhood exposure to social disadvantage is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders and poor developmental, educational, and occupational outcomes, presumably because adverse exposures alter the neurodevelopmental processes that contribute to risk trajectories. Yet, given the limited social mobility in the United States and other countries, childhood social disadvantage is frequently preceded by maternal social disadvantage during pregnancy, potentially altering fetal brain development during a period of high neuroplasticity through hormonal, microbiome, epigenetic, and immune factors that cross the placenta and fetal blood-brain barrier. The current study examines prenatal social disadvantage to determine whether these exposures in utero are associated with alterations in functional brain networks as early as birth.

Prenatal environment is associated with the pace of cortical network development over the first three years of life.

Environmental influences on brain structure and function during early development have been well-characterized, but whether early environments are associated with the pace of brain development is not clear. In pre-registered analyses, we use flexible non-linear models to test the theory that prenatal disadvantage is associated with differences in trajectories of intrinsic brain network development from birth to three years (n = 261). Prenatal disadvantage was assessed using a latent factor of socioeconomic disadvantage that included measures of mother's income-to-needs ratio, educational attainment, area deprivation index, insurance status, and nutrition.

Associations between Parenting and Cognitive and Language Abilities at 2 Years of Age Depend on Prenatal Exposure to Disadvantage.

Objective: To investigate whether parenting or neonatal brain volumes mediate associations between prenatal social disadvantage (PSD) and cognitive/language abilities and whether these mechanisms vary by level of disadvantage.

Study Design: Pregnant women were recruited prospectively from obstetric clinics in St Louis, Missouri. PSD encompassed access to social (eg, education) and material (eg, income to needs, health insurance, area deprivation, and nutrition) resources during pregnancy.

Multilayer network associations between the exposome and childhood brain development.

Growing up in a high poverty neighborhood is associated with elevated risk for academic challenges and health problems. Here, we take a data-driven approach to exploring how measures of children's environments relate to the development of their brain structure and function in a community sample of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years. We constructed exposomes including measures of family socioeconomic status, children's exposure to adversity, and geocoded measures of neighborhood socioeconomic status, crime, and environmental toxins.

Developmental Correlates of Accelerated Molar Eruption in Early Childhood.

Background: Adversity has been linked to accelerated maturation. Molar eruption is a simple and scalable way to identify early maturation, but its developmental correlates remain unexplored. Thus, we examined whether accelerated maturation as indexed by molar eruption is associated with children's mental health or cognitive skills.

Prenatal environment is associated with the pace of cortical network development over the first three years of life.

Environmental influences on brain structure and function during early development have been well-characterized. In pre-registered analyses, we test the theory that socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with differences in trajectories of intrinsic brain network development from birth to three years ( = 261). Prenatal SES is associated with developmental increases in cortical network segregation, with neonates and toddlers from lower-SES backgrounds showing a steeper increase in cortical network segregation with age, consistent with accelerated network development.

Individual differences in T1w/T2w ratio development during childhood.

Myelination is a key developmental process that promotes rapid and efficient information transfer. Myelin also stabilizes existing brain networks and thus may constrain neuroplasticity, defined here as the brain's potential to change in response to experiences rather than the canonical definition as the process of change. Characterizing individual differences in neuroplasticity may shed light on mechanisms by which early experiences shape learning, brain and body development, and response to interventions.

The Age of Reason: Functional Brain Network Development during Childhood.

Human childhood is characterized by dramatic changes in the mind and brain. However, little is known about the large-scale intrinsic cortical network changes that occur during childhood because of methodological challenges in scanning young children. Here, we overcome this barrier by using sophisticated acquisition and analysis tools to investigate functional network development in children between the ages of 4 and 10 years ([Formula: see text]; 50 female, 42 male).

Early stressful experiences are associated with reduced neural responses to naturalistic emotional and social content in children.

How do children's experiences relate to their naturalistic emotional and social processing? Because children can struggle with tasks in the scanner, we collected fMRI data while 4-to-11-year-olds watched a short film with positive and negative emotional events, and rich parent-child interactions (n = 70). We captured broad, normative stressful experiences by examining socioeconomic status (SES) and stressful life events, as well as children's more proximal experiences with their parents. For a sub-sample (n = 30), parenting behaviors were measured during a parent-child interaction, consisting of a picture book, a challenging puzzle, and free play with novel toys.

Individual differences in frontoparietal plasticity in humans.

Neuroplasticity, defined as the brain's potential to change in response to its environment, has been extensively studied at the cellular and molecular levels. Work in animal models suggests that stimulation to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) enhances plasticity, and that myelination constrains plasticity. Little is known, however, about whether proxy measures of these properties in the human brain are associated with learning.

Functional brain network community structure in childhood: Unfinished territories and fuzzy boundaries.

Adult cortex is organized into distributed functional communities. Yet, little is known about community architecture of children's brains. Here, we uncovered the community structure of cortex in childhood using fMRI data from 670 children aged 9-11 years (48% female, replication sample n=544, 56% female) from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study.

Evaluating the sensitivity of functional connectivity measures to motion artifact in resting-state fMRI data.

Functional connectivity (FC) networks are typically inferred from resting-state fMRI data using the Pearson correlation between BOLD time series from pairs of brain regions. However, alternative methods of estimating functional connectivity have not been systematically tested for their sensitivity or robustness to head motion artifact. Here, we evaluate the sensitivity of eight different functional connectivity measures to motion artifact using resting-state data from the Human Connectome Project.

QSIPrep: an integrative platform for preprocessing and reconstructing diffusion MRI data.

Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) is the primary method for noninvasively studying the organization of white matter in the human brain. Here we introduce QSIPrep, an integrative software platform for the processing of diffusion images that is compatible with nearly all dMRI sampling schemes. Drawing on a diverse set of software suites to capitalize on their complementary strengths, QSIPrep facilitates the implementation of best practices for processing of diffusion images.

Early life stress is associated with earlier emergence of permanent molars.

Exposure to adversity can accelerate biological aging. However, existing biomarkers of early aging are either costly and difficult to collect, like epigenetic signatures, or cannot be detected until late childhood, like pubertal onset. We evaluated the hypothesis that early adversity is associated with earlier molar eruption, an easily assessed measure that has been used to track the length of childhood across primates.

Environmental influences on the pace of brain development.

Childhood socio-economic status (SES), a measure of the availability of material and social resources, is one of the strongest predictors of lifelong well-being. Here we review evidence that experiences associated with childhood SES affect not only the outcome but also the pace of brain development. We argue that higher childhood SES is associated with protracted structural brain development and a prolonged trajectory of functional network segregation, ultimately leading to more efficient cortical networks in adulthood.

Early childhood stress is associated with blunted development of ventral tegmental area functional connectivity.

Early life stress increases risk for later psychopathology, due in part to changes in dopaminergic brain systems that support reward processing and motivation. Work in animals has shown that early life stress has a profound impact on the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which provides dopamine to regions including nucleus accumbens (NAcc), anterior hippocampus, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), with cascading effects over the course of development. However, little is known about how early stress exposure shifts the developmental trajectory of mesocorticolimbic circuitry in humans.

Associations between Neighborhood SES and Functional Brain Network Development.

Higher socioeconomic status (SES) in childhood is associated with stronger cognitive abilities, higher academic achievement, and lower incidence of mental illness later in development. While prior work has mapped the associations between neighborhood SES and brain structure, little is known about the relationship between SES and intrinsic neural dynamics. Here, we capitalize upon a large cross-sectional community-based sample (Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort, ages 8-22 years, n = 1012) to examine associations between age, SES, and functional brain network topology.

Nutritional status of foster children in the U.S.: Implications for cognitive and behavioral development.

Objective: Children in foster care are at greater risk for poor health, physical, cognitive, behavioral, and developmental outcomes than are children in the general population. Considerable research links early nutrition to later cognitive and behavioral outcomes. The aim of this narrative review is to examine the prevalence of poor nutrition and its relation to subsequent health and development in foster children.