The emergence of a functionally flexible brain during early infancy

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Adult brain functional flexibility underpins cognitive flexibility.
• Assessing cognitive flexibility in early infancy is challenging.
• Understanding early neural development is crucial for cognitive function.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the spatiotemporal development of neural flexibility in infants.
• To establish a quantitative measure for neural flexibility in early life.
• To explore the relationship between early neural flexibility and later cognitive ability.

Main Methods:

• Longitudinal resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) in 52 infants (0-2 years).
• Sliding window analysis to quantify neural flexibility (changes in functional module allegiance).
• Correlation analysis between early neural flexibility and later cognitive assessments.

Main Results:

• Neural flexibility increased with age in whole brain, motor, and high-order networks, but was stable in visual regions.
• Early neural flexibility in the primary visual network negatively correlated with later cognitive ability.
• Identified a "flexible club" of brain regions associated with adult cognitive flexibility.

Conclusions:

• Neural flexibility exhibits non-uniform spatial and temporal development in early infancy.
• Early neural flexibility is a potential biomarker for cognitive development.
• MR-derived neural flexibility offers insights into the neural substrates of cognitive flexibility development.