TY - JOUR T1 - Developmental Maturation of Dynamic Causal Control Signals in Higher-Order Cognition: A Neurocognitive Network Model A1 - Supekar, Kaustubh A1 - Menon, Vinod Y1 - 2012/02/02 N2 - Author Summary The human brain undergoes significant maturational changes between childhood and adulthood that are thought to enable increasingly sophisticated thoughts and behaviors. One of the skills that we develop over time is the ability to problem solve, which relies in turn on the ability to control our attention and successfully direct our cognitive efforts. Using a novel multi-pronged neuroimaging approach, we identify for the first time the dynamic brain systems underlying the maturation of problem solving abilities. We find that the anterior insula, part of a larger network of regions previously shown to be important for salience processing and generating influential control signals, shows weaker influences over other key brain regions important for task performance in children compared to adults. In addition, structural connections between the anterior insula and other key regions were found to be weaker in children compared to adults. Importantly, measures of causal influences between key regions could be used to predict individual differences in behavioral performance. Our study is the first to show that the anterior insula, by virtue of its dynamic influences on other key brain regions, shows developmental differences in both structural and functional connectivity, which may contribute to more mature cognitive abilities in adulthood compared to childhood. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 2 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002374 SP - e1002374 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002374 ER -