Integrating cognition and systems neuroscience to understand child development

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The human brain has a characteristic organisation. This organisation emerges early in life, even before we are born, and continues to change through adolescence and into early adulthood. The emergence and continual refinement of brain networks, connecting different regions of the brain across large distances, allows for increasing ‘functional specialisation’. That is, these networks become more dedicated to particular cognitive processes. But this gradual process of network emergence is incredibly variable across individuals, and it is not clear why this diversity exists, what consequences it holds for cognition, or what factors might shape it over time. The purpose of this programme is to address these gaps in our understanding. We develop and apply multiple different analysis tools, including computational models inspired by artificial intelligence, and integrate these with brain imaging data. This combination allows us to unpack typical and atypical developmental processes. This allows us to address the following questions: Firstly, how do we capture the incredible variability in brain development that exists across childhood and adolescence, and does this variability map to established diagnostic categories? Secondly, can we build developmental models that formalise simple biological principles in order to capture complex developmental phenomena? Thirdly, can we use these models to bridge scales and species to establish fundamental and causal mechanisms that shape development?