Brain dynamics under resting state and naturalistic conditions from childhood to adolescence

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Over the past decade, increasing evidence has shown that the brains of children, adolescents and adults are different in very complex ways.  Across development, the pattern of changes in both the brain and in behaviour may be linear or nonlinear, as a result of the structural, functional and network level changes that occur across the lifespan. While changes in brain structure are relatively well understood, less is known about brain dynamics, i.e. the large-scale functional organization supporting fundamental features of brain activity and brain function. Understanding brain dynamics and how functional organization changes over development, from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to adulthood is one of the key challenges in neuroscience. The overall goal of this NSERC proposal is to elucidate the brain's developmental changes in resting stage (RS; absence of a task) and naturalistic, real-world interactions starting in early childhood.     Probing the brain during the resting state (RS) has revealed that even when the brain is not involved in active cognitive tasks, it exhibits a highly structured organization of activity characterized by synchronous neural activity over spatially distributed networks. These networks play a critical role in mediating complex functions such as memory, language, and emotion. There is evidence that basic functional brain networks are present from early childhood and that these networks become specialized during the course of adolescence. Thus far, there are no studies that have directly compared functional connectivity from childhood to adolescence and no studies that have compared connectivity between RS and EEG connectivity during naturalistic interactions. Within this proposed DG program my short-term objectives over the next five years are: (1) characterize the topology of RS-functional networks in participants between the ages of 9-18 years, (2) evaluate the changes in dynamic brain states RS- in participants between the ages of 9-18 years, and (3) validate methods and analysis pipeline to study functional connectivity during naturalistic, real-world tasks in children between the ages of 5-7 years of age.     I will address the fundamental question: How do the metrics of functional connectivity shift in organization when embedded within the context of naturalistic interactions? This work will produce a connectome-informed theory of neurodevelopment to answer fundamental questions of brain-behaviour relationships. I will use established measures of functional connectivity and apply graph theory analysis to explore and evaluate the relationship in brain dynamics over the course of development.