Development of Functional Brain Networks in Children

The human brain evolves rapidly throughout childhood as large-scale communication pathways emerge and refine. Functional brain networks—sets of distributed regions whose activity fluctuates in concert—underpin sensory processing, cognitive control and social behaviours. Early in life these networks are dominated by local connectivity, supporting basic sensorimotor functions. With maturation, long-range connections strengthen, enabling integration across specialised regions and giving rise to efficient “small-world” architectures that balance segregated processing with global communication. This reorganisation reflects hierarchical principles: primary sensory and motor areas mature earlier, while association cortices involved in high-order cognition undergo protracted development. Underlying these macro-scale changes are cellular processes such as synaptic pruning and myelination, guided by genetic and activity-dependent mechanisms. The unfolding of functional network architecture has wide-ranging implications for learning, behaviour and resilience to neurodevelopmental disorders, and offers a framework for interpreting atypical trajectories observed in clinical populations.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have mapped how functional connectivity evolves along a cortical hierarchy extending from sensorimotor to transmodal regions. In one large-scale analysis spanning childhood to early adulthood (ages 5–23 years), connectivity in primary sensorimotor areas was found to increase steadily, while association cortices displayed a relative decline in connectivity, thus sharpening the overarching cortical hierarchy. These patterns were consistent across four independent cohorts and signal a common developmental axis for functional network maturation. Complementary work on the structural connectome revealed linear trajectories in white matter network properties, showing that global integration increases uniformly from childhood to adolescence. Integrative analyses linking diffusion MRI with regional gene expression uncovered molecular pathways—particularly ion transport and synaptic development—that correlate with the maturation of long-range connections, and highlighted associations with myelin content and cortical laminar structure.

Development of Functional Brain Networks in Children publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in development of functional brain networks in children across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Functional connectivity: The statistical relationship between activity patterns in distinct brain regions, often measured via correlations in fMRI signal.

Sensorimotor-association axis: A hierarchical gradient of cortical organisation ranging from primary sensory and motor areas to transmodal association regions.

Resting-state fMRI: Functional MRI acquired while subjects are not engaged in explicit tasks, used to probe intrinsic network architecture.

Modularity: A property of networks describing the degree to which nodes cluster into distinct communities with dense internal connections and sparser external links.

Default-mode network: A set of interconnected regions active during internally focused tasks, such as autobiographical memory and self-referential thought.

References

1. Functional connectivity development along the sensorimotor-association axis enhances the cortical hierarchy. Nature Communications (2024).
2. Resting state functional brain connectivity in child and adolescent psychiatry: where are we now?. Neuropsychopharmacology (2024).
3. Functional network modules overlap and are linked to interindividual connectome differences during human brain development. PLOS Biology (2024).
4. Longitudinal development of the human white matter structural connectome and its association with brain transcriptomic and cellular architecture. Communications Biology (2023).
5. Functional Brain Networks Develop from a “Local to Distributed” Organization. PLOS Computational Biology (2009).
6. Development of Large-Scale Functional Brain Networks in Children. PLOS Biology (2009).