Role of Experience in Development of Cognitive Control and Frontal Cortex

描述(由申请人提供)：开发的特点是在思想和行动上增加灵活性，将规则从特定于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实验中对成年人的这种技能进行了有效的表征，在额叶损伤的患者中也是如此。这项研究表明，在规则引导的行动中，不断增加的复杂性会沿着嘴-尾轴招募额叶皮质。我们在这里假设，从童年中期到成年，额叶皮质的功能发育和相关的行为表现将遵循同样的模式。具体地说，我们预测，在简单规则任务中的成熟行为将比复杂任务更早地出现在发育过程中，这将与尾侧额叶皮质水平的功能效率相关，而不是吻部区域。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测试这一假设，该算法旨在解码整个开发过程中与规则相关的表示的稳定性。此外，我们还检验了表征稳定性依赖于经验的预测。额叶皮质的一部分有一个特别漫长的发育过程，已经被证明对积极和消极的环境经验都很敏感。我们没有使用年龄作为经验的代理，而是求助于社会经济地位(SES)，这已被证明是认知控制发展的预测因素。与低SES家族相比，高SES家族中的条目、交互作用和经验的可用性可能与额叶皮质水平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更相关，这表明SES差异的影响可能特别明显，具体到抽象规则结构的发展。我们将考察SES作为丰富经验的代理，在行为和神经成像实验中对规则指导行为的发展的具体贡献。在包括自闭症、ADHD和强迫症在内的发育障碍中，特定项目的具体性和坚持性是普遍存在的。我们建议表征规则使用在不同抽象水平的发展，允许在理解这些技能的发展过程中具有新的特殊性。在这一发展中发现与基于经验的因素(SES)的特定关系具有额外的潜力，即定义赋予特定于认知灵活性的风险的变量，并将为社会和教育提供信息 政策正在向前推进。

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.