Cognitive flexibility in humans may begin to develop during the first two years of life, a study finds. Cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch between mental processes in response to different task demands. This attribute is positively associated with reading ability, academic success, resilience to stress, and creativity and negatively associated with risk of various neurological and psychiatric disorders. To examine the emergence of neural flexibility, which is thought to underlie cognitive flexibility, Weili Lin and colleagues used MRI to measure brain activity during sleep up to seven times in 52 typically developing infants under the age of 2 years. The authors define neural flexibility as the frequency with which a brain region changes its role or allegiance from one functional network to another. Neural flexibility increased with age across the whole brain, specifically in regions that control movement, potentially enabling infants to learn motor skills. Neural flexibility also increased with age in regions involved in higher-level cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and response inhibition, indicating continuing development of these networks. The age-related increase in neural flexibility was highest in brain regions implicated in cognitive flexibility in adults, suggesting that cognitive flexibility may begin to develop during the first two years of life. According to the authors, the findings provide insights into the development of higher-level brain functions.
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Article #20-02645: "The emergence of a functionally flexible brain during early infancy," by Weiyan Yin et al.
MEDIA CONTACT: Weili Lin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC; e-mail: < weili_lin@med.unc.edu >
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences