A new study found that children as young as four had signs of a brain network present in adults that deals with challenging cognitive problems. The multitasking network helps people focus their attention, juggle many items in memory at once, and solve complex tasks such as those involving algebra.
And while this network isn’t fully developed in children, the study showed it works similarly to adults, said Zeynep Saygin, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University. The study involved adults and children between the ages of 4 and 12 whose brains were scanned using fMRI while they attempted to complete a difficult task.
Saygin said “We found that the multiple demand network was a distinct network even in young children and was separate from the language network, just as it is in adults, that was something that was not known for sure. One alternative would be that it takes time for these separate networks in the brain to differentiate in children, but that’s not what we found”.
The results may help identify neurodevelopmental impairments in cognitive control among clinical samples, such as children struggling with ADHD, conduct disorder or brain injury, which could potentially influence treatment development.
Normal vs. Abnormal
Schettini said “By identifying typical variability in the relationship between neural activation and performance on a task, we can better understand what is considered normal vs. abnormal, 44 adults aged 18 to 38 and 37 children aged 4 to 12 participated in the study”.
During the fMRI scan, the study participants were given a rather difficult task: They were shown a series of grids containing nine to 12 squares, some of which were blue. They were then shown two grids and had to choose which matched the sequence of blue squares they had seen in the earlier grids. Children had easier exams than adults.
The same participants also completed a language task where they listened to meaningful sentences and a control condition. In adults, the language brain network is spatially adjacent to, but separate from, the multiple demand network. However, children’s language skills are also still developing, so it was unclear whether the multiple demand network also supports this skill as it develops.
The results showed that the same brain region the multiple demands network, located in the frontal and parietal cortex—was activated in both children and adults when they completed the demanding task, and was not activated at all for the language task.
Difficult Problems
There were reasons to expect that children would not have an adult-like multiple demand network, Saygin said “We know that children don’t always know what to focus on, are easily distracted and don’t always do well when they get into difficult problems. So it was not a given that they would use the same multi-demand network that adults use, But even in 4-year-olds, this network is quite robust and very different from the language network”.
There were some differences compared to adults. The magnitude of the response seen in the brain was smaller in children when they attempted the task, suggesting that it takes years for the brain to mature and “grow up” to adult levels, she said.
But even in children with multiple demands, brain activation reflected how hard they tried and how well they performed during the task, regardless of age; individual performance variability was reflected in brain activation at each age. “The findings give us a better understanding of how high-level cognitive ability emerges in people and could help us design interventions when people have problems with cognitive control,” Saygin said.
