Заседание лаборатории 7.03

С докладом "Mental attention: Common and distinct brain areas across development" выступил младший научный сотрудник лаборатории Андрей Фабер .

Cognitive abilities develop with age as reflected by improved performance in tasks of executive function and working memory. Working memory is a well-established concept and its neural correlates have been documented with neuroimaging. Mental attention is considered as the maturational component of working memory. Critically, little is known about the development of the brain correlates of mental attention through childhood and adolescence. Authors used a developmental construct of mental attention to investigate brain correlates related to solving tasks with multiple levels of difficulty in children, adolescents, and adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The study revealed that mental attention is expressed in frontoparietal regions in children, adolescents and adults, which is consistent with past research on working memory. However, it was observe that common brain regions becoming distinct as a function of age group, expressed by effects of hemispheric variation and spatial extent. Overall, results highlight the protracted development of the prefrontal cortex and support the notion of functional reorganisation during school-age years.