Development of Top-Down Cortical Propagations in Youth

Abstract

Hierarchical processing requires activity propagating between higher and lower-order cortical areas. However, studies of brain development have chiefly quantified fluctuations within regions over time rather than propagations occurring over space. Here, we leveraged advances in neuroimaging and computer vision to track cortical activity propagations in a large sample of youth (n=388). We found that propagations robustly ascend and descend the cortical hierarchy, and that top-down propagations become both more prevalent with cognitive control demands and with development in youth.

Conserved whole-brain spatiomolecular gradients shape adult brain functional organization

“…A robust functional hierarchy has been described that situates different cortical brain regions along a sensorimotor-association axis (Bernhardt et al, 2022; Burt et al, 2018; Harris et al, 2019; Margulies et al, 2016; Sydnor et al, 2021). Besides discriminating functional roles of different cortical territories, variation in other physiological properties of the cortex occur along a similar topography to the functional hierarchy (Burt et al, 2018; Fulcher et al, 2019; Gao et al, 2020; Wang, 2020), and it may serve as a principal avenue for directional functional signals (Manea et al, 2022; Pines et al, 2022; Siegle et al, 2021; Vézquez-Rodríguez et al, 2020). Cortical peaks in the functional hierarchy are distributed nearly maximally distant from one another (Margulies et al, 2016; Oligschläger et al, 2019), suggesting that the functional hierarchy may arise due to interacting underlying transcriptomic gradients (Wagstyl et al, 2022).…”