Role of Experience in Development of Cognitive Control and Frontal Cortex

描述（由申请人提供）：发展的特点是增加思想和行动的灵活性，使规则能够从特定项目的实例推广到支持灵活行为的抽象规则类，并可以推广到新的情况。我们利用了一个已建立的范例，该范例在行为和功能磁共振成像实验中有效地描述了成人以及额叶损伤患者的这种技能。这项工作表明，在规则引导的行动中，复杂性的增加会使额叶皮层沿着后脑-尾轴聚集。我们假设，从童年中期到成年，额叶皮质的功能发展以及相关的行为表现将遵循相同的模式。具体来说，我们预测简单规则任务中的成熟行为将比更复杂的任务更早地在发育中表现出来，这将与尾侧额叶皮层水平的功能效率相关，而不是吻侧区域。利用现有的文献，我们预测这种功能的发展是规则相关表征的皮质编码稳定性增加的反映。我们使用多体素模式分类算法来验证这一假设，该算法旨在解码跨开发的规则相关表示的稳定性。此外，我们检验了表征稳定性依赖于经验的预测。额叶皮层的某些部分有一个特别漫长的发育过程，并被证明对积极和消极的环境经历都很敏感。我们不是用年龄作为经验的代表，而是转向社会经济地位（SES），这已被证明是认知控制发展的预测指标。相对于低经济地位家庭，高经济地位家庭的物品可用性、互动和经历可能与额叶皮层表征稳定性的基于经验的变化有关。此外，经验之间的可变性必然与抽象规则表征的发展而不是具体规则表征的发展更相关，这表明社会经济地位差异的影响可能对抽象规则结构的发展更为明显。我们将研究SES的具体贡献，作为丰富经验的代理，在行为和神经影像学实验中对规则指导行动的发展。特定项目的具体性和持久性在发育障碍中普遍存在，包括自闭症、多动症和强迫症。我们建议在不同的抽象层次上描述规则使用的发展，允许在理解这些技能的发展过程中具有新的特异性。在这一发展过程中，揭示与基于经验的因素（SES）的特定关系，具有定义赋予认知灵活性特定风险的变量的附加潜力，并将为社会和教育提供信息

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Development is charactarized by increasing flexibility in thought and action, enabeling the generalization of rules from item-specific instances to abstract classes of rules that support flexible behavior and can be generalized to novel situations. We capitalized on an established paradigm that has been effective in charactarizing this skill in adults in behavioral and fMRI experiments, and also in patients with frontal damage. This work has shown that increasing complexity in rule-guided action recruites the frontal cortex along a rostro- caudal axis. We hypothesize here that the functional development of the frontal cortex, from middle childhood to adulthood, and associated behavioral performance will follow the same pattern. Specifically, we predict that mature behavior in simple rule tasks will be evident earlier in development than more complex tasks and that this will be associated with functional effiency at the level of the frontal cortex in caudal prior to rostral regions. Using th extant literature, we predict that this functional development is a reflection of increases in the stability of cortical coding of rule-relevant representations. We test this hypothesis using multi-voxel pattern classification algorithms designed to decode the stability of rule-relevant representations across development. Moreover, we test the prediction that representational stability is dependent on experience. Portions of the frontal cortex have an especially protracted developmental course and have been shown to be susceptible to both positive and negative environmental experiences. Rather than use age as a proxy for experience, we turn to socioeconomic status (SES), which has been shown to be a predictor of cognitive control development. Availability of items, interactions, and experiences in high relative to low SES families may prove relevant for experience-based changes in representational stability at the level of the frontal cortex. Moreover, variability among experiences is necessarily more relevant for the development of abstract rather than concrete rule representations, indicating that the impact of SES differences may be evident specific to the development of abstract rule structures. We will examine the specific contribution of SES, as a proxy for enriching experiences, to the development of rule-guided action in both behavioral and neuroimaging experiments. RELEVANCE Item-specific concreteness and perseveration are ubiquitous in developmental disorders including Autism, ADHD, and OCD. We propose to characterize development of rule use at varying levels of abstraction, allowing for novel specificity in understanding the deveopmental course of these skills. Uncovering a specific relationship with experience-based factors (SES) in this development has the added potential of defining variables that confer risk specific to cognitive flexibility and will inform social and educational policy moving forward.