Publication Type	Review
Authors	Sydnor V, Larsen B, Bassett D, Alexander-Bloch A, Fair D, Liston C, Mackey A, Milham M, Pines A, Roalf D, Seidlitz J, Xu T, Raznahan A, Satterthwaite T
Journal	Neuron
Volume	109
Issue	18
Pagination	2820-2846
Date Published	07/15/2021
ISSN	1097-4199
Keywords	Cerebral Cortex, Mental Disorders, Neuronal Plasticity
Abstract	The human brain undergoes a prolonged period of cortical development that spans multiple decades. During childhood and adolescence, cortical development progresses from lower-order, primary and unimodal cortices with sensory and motor functions to higher-order, transmodal association cortices subserving executive, socioemotional, and mentalizing functions. The spatiotemporal patterning of cortical maturation thus proceeds in a hierarchical manner, conforming to an evolutionarily rooted, sensorimotor-to-association axis of cortical organization. This developmental program has been characterized by data derived from multimodal human neuroimaging and is linked to the hierarchical unfolding of plasticity-related neurobiological events. Critically, this developmental program serves to enhance feature variation between lower-order and higher-order regions, thus endowing the brain's association cortices with unique functional properties. However, accumulating evidence suggests that protracted plasticity within late-maturing association cortices, which represents a defining feature of the human developmental program, also confers risk for diverse developmental psychopathologies.
DOI	10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.016
PubMed ID	34270921
PubMed Central ID	PMC8448958