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Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence
BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a time of ongoing neural maturation and cognitive development, especially regarding executive functions. In the current study, age‐related differences in the neural correlates of different executive functions were tracked by comparing three age groups consisting of adolesc...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6160639/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30051640 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/brb3.1063 |
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author | Moisala, Mona Salmela, Viljami Carlson, Synnove Salmela‐Aro, Katariina Lonka, Kirsti Hakkarainen, Kai Alho, Kimmo |
author_facet | Moisala, Mona Salmela, Viljami Carlson, Synnove Salmela‐Aro, Katariina Lonka, Kirsti Hakkarainen, Kai Alho, Kimmo |
author_sort | Moisala, Mona |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a time of ongoing neural maturation and cognitive development, especially regarding executive functions. In the current study, age‐related differences in the neural correlates of different executive functions were tracked by comparing three age groups consisting of adolescents and young adults. METHODS: Brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 167 human participants (13‐ to 14‐year‐old middle adolescents, 16‐ to 17‐year‐old late adolescents and 20‐ to 24‐year‐old young adults; 80 female, 87 male) while they performed attention and working memory tasks. The tasks were designed to tap into four putative sub‐processes of executive function: division of attention, inhibition of distractors, working memory, and attention switching. RESULTS: Behaviorally, our results demonstrated superior task performance in older participants across all task types. When brain activity was examined, young adult participants demonstrated a greater degree of overlap between brain regions recruited by the different executive tasks than adolescent participants. Similarly, functional connectivity between frontoparietal cortical regions was less task specific in the young adult participants than in adolescent participants. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these results demonstrate that the similarity between different executive processes in terms of both neural recruitment and functional connectivity increases with age from middle adolescence to early adulthood, possibly contributing to age‐related behavioral improvements in executive functioning. These developmental changes in brain recruitment may reflect a more homogenous morphological organization between process‐specific neural networks, increased reliance on a more domain‐general network involved in executive processing, or developmental changes in cognitive strategy. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6160639 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-61606392018-10-01 Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence Moisala, Mona Salmela, Viljami Carlson, Synnove Salmela‐Aro, Katariina Lonka, Kirsti Hakkarainen, Kai Alho, Kimmo Brain Behav Original Research BACKGROUND: Adolescence is a time of ongoing neural maturation and cognitive development, especially regarding executive functions. In the current study, age‐related differences in the neural correlates of different executive functions were tracked by comparing three age groups consisting of adolescents and young adults. METHODS: Brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from 167 human participants (13‐ to 14‐year‐old middle adolescents, 16‐ to 17‐year‐old late adolescents and 20‐ to 24‐year‐old young adults; 80 female, 87 male) while they performed attention and working memory tasks. The tasks were designed to tap into four putative sub‐processes of executive function: division of attention, inhibition of distractors, working memory, and attention switching. RESULTS: Behaviorally, our results demonstrated superior task performance in older participants across all task types. When brain activity was examined, young adult participants demonstrated a greater degree of overlap between brain regions recruited by the different executive tasks than adolescent participants. Similarly, functional connectivity between frontoparietal cortical regions was less task specific in the young adult participants than in adolescent participants. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these results demonstrate that the similarity between different executive processes in terms of both neural recruitment and functional connectivity increases with age from middle adolescence to early adulthood, possibly contributing to age‐related behavioral improvements in executive functioning. These developmental changes in brain recruitment may reflect a more homogenous morphological organization between process‐specific neural networks, increased reliance on a more domain‐general network involved in executive processing, or developmental changes in cognitive strategy. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2018-07-26 /pmc/articles/PMC6160639/ /pubmed/30051640 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/brb3.1063 Text en © 2018 The Authors. Brain and Behavior published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
spellingShingle | Original Research Moisala, Mona Salmela, Viljami Carlson, Synnove Salmela‐Aro, Katariina Lonka, Kirsti Hakkarainen, Kai Alho, Kimmo Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title | Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title_full | Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title_fullStr | Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title_full_unstemmed | Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title_short | Neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
title_sort | neural activity patterns between different executive tasks are more similar in adulthood than in adolescence |
topic | Original Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6160639/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30051640 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/brb3.1063 |
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