Children as young as 4 years old show evidence of a network in the brain found in adults that tackles difficult cognitive problems, a new study from Ohio State University found.
The multiple demand network helps people focus their attention, juggle several things in memory at the same time, and solve difficult problems like those involving math.
The study involved adults and 4- to 12-year-old children whose brains were scanned in an fMRI while they tried to complete a difficult task.
The study was led by Elana Schettini, a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State, and the results were published online recently in the Journal of Neuroscience. Ohio State graduate student Kelly Hiersche was also a co-author.
The study involved 44 adults 18 to 38 years old and 37 children aged 4 to 12.
While being scanned in the fMRI, study participants were given a relatively 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 they had to choose which one matched the sequence of blue squares they had seen in earlier grids. Children were given easier trials than adults.
The same participants also completed a language task where they listened to meaningful sentences and control conditions. In adults, the language brain network is spatially adjacent to, but separate from, the multiple demand network. But children’s language skills are also still developing and so it was unclear whether the multiple demand network also supports this skill as it develops.
Results showed that the same area of the brain – the multiple demand network, located in the frontal and parietal cortices – was activated in both children and adults when they completed the challenging task, and not at all activated for the language task.
There were some differences from adults. The response magnitude seen in the brain was smaller in children as they tried to solve the task, indicating it takes years for the brain to mature and “ramp up” to adult levels, she said.
But even in children, multiple demand brain activation reflected how hard they tried and how well they performed during the task, regardless of age; individual variability in performance was reflected in the brain activation at all ages.
