Citation

Baum GL, Cui Z, Roalf DR, Ciric R, Betzel RF, Larsen B, Cieslak M, Cook PA, Xia CH, Moore TM, Ruparel K, Oathes DJ, Alexander-Bloch AF, Shinohara RT, Raznahan A, Gur RE, Gur RC, Bassett DS, Satterthwaite TD. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2019; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1912034117

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The human brain is organized into a hierarchy of functional systems that evolve in childhood and adolescence to support the dynamic control of attention and behavior. However, it remains unknown how developing white-matter architecture supports coordinated fluctuations in neural activity underlying cognition. We document marked remodeling of structure-function coupling in youth, which aligns with cortical hierarchies of functional specialization and evolutionary expansion. Further, we demonstrate that structure-function coupling in rostrolateral prefrontal cortex supports age-related improvements in executive ability. These findings have broad relevance for accounts of experience-dependent plasticity in healthy development and abnormal development associated with neuropsychiatric illness.

The protracted development of structural and functional brain connectivity within distributed association networks coincides with improvements in higher-order cognitive processes such as executive function. However, it remains unclear how white-matter architecture develops during youth to directly support coordinated neural activity. Here, we characterize the development of structure-function coupling using diffusion-weighted imaging and n-back functional MRI data in a sample of 727 individuals (ages 8 to 23 y). We found that spatial variability in structure-function coupling aligned with cortical hierarchies of functional specialization and evolutionary expansion. Furthermore, hierarchy-dependent age effects on structure-function coupling localized to transmodal cortex in both cross-sectional data and a subset of participants with longitudinal data (n = 294). Moreover, structure-function coupling in rostrolateral prefrontal cortex was associated with executive performance and partially mediated age-related improvements in executive function. Together, these findings delineate a critical dimension of adolescent brain development, whereby the coupling between structural and functional connectivity remodels to support functional specialization and cognition.

brain developmentMRIconnectomecortical organizationstructure-function

Language: en