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Emerging evidence underscores the prenatal period's critical role in shaping later cognition and health, influenced by an intricate interplay of parental genetic and environmental factors. Birth weight is commonly used as a retrospective indicator of fetal development, but recent focus has shifted to more specific proxies of neurodevelopment, like cortical sulcal patterns, which are established in utero and remain stable after birth. This study aimed to elucidate the interrelated effects of parental socioeconomic status, brain volume, birth weight, and sulcal patterns in the anterior cingulate cortex. Utilizing structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), parental educational attainment, and related polygenic risk scores, the study analyzed 203 healthy right-handed participants aged 9 to 18. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex sulcal pattern is influenced by parental socioeconomic status and global brain volume, with socioeconomic status correlating with a polygenic risk score. These findings suggest that prenatal neurodevelopmental processes may mediate the intergenerational transmission of inequalities., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Visual processing relies on the identification of both local and global features of visual stimuli. While well investigated at the behavioral level, the underlying brain mechanisms are less clear, especially in the context of aging. Using fMRI, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates underlying local and global processing in early and late adulthood. We recruited 77 healthy adults aged 19-77 who completed a visual search task based on 2-level hierarchical stimuli made of squares and/or circles. Participants were instructed to detect a target (a square) at either a local (small) or global (large) level of a hierarchical geometrical form, in the presence or absence of other hierarchical geometrical forms (distractors). At the behavioral level, we revealed high accuracy for all participants, but older participants were slower to detect local targets, specifically in presence of distractors. At the brain level, while both local and global processing were associated with occipital activation, local processing also recruited the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, that are core regions of the salience network. However, while the presence of distractors in the local condition elicited specifically stronger activation within the right anterior insula for the young group, it was not observed for older participants. In addition, older participants showed less activation than younger participants in the occipital cortex, especially for the most complex conditions. Our findings suggest that the brain correlates underlying local and global processing change with aging, especially for complex visual patterns. These results are discussed in terms of top-down reduction effects from the salience network on primary visual areas, that may lead to specific difficulties to process local visual details in older adults., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Doucet et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Although young children can accurately determine that two rows contain the same number of coins when they are placed in a one-to-one correspondence, children younger than 7 years of age erroneously think that the longer row contains more coins when the coins in one of the rows are spread apart. To demonstrate that prefrontal inhibitory control is necessary to succeed at this task (Piaget's conservation-of-number task), we studied the relationship between the percentage of BOLD signal changes in the brain areas activated in this developmental task and behavioral performance on a Stroop task and a Backward Digit Span task. The level of activation in the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus was selectively related to inhibitory control efficiency (i.e., the Stroop task), whereas the activation in the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was selectively related to the ability to manipulate numerical information in working memory (i.e., the Backward Digit Span task). Taken together, the results indicate that to acquire number conservation, children's brains must not only activate the reversibility of cognitive operations (supported by the IPS) but also inhibit a misleading length-equal-number strategy (supported by the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus).

Jean Piaget's theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children's thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piaget's conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Visual scenes are processed in terms of spatial frequencies. Low spatial frequencies (LSF) carry coarse information, whereas high spatial frequencies (HSF) subsequently carry information about fine details. The present magnetic resonance imaging study investigated how cortical thickness covaried with LSF/HSF processing abilities in ten-year-old children and adults. Participants indicated whether natural scenes that were filtered in either LSF or HSF represented outdoor or indoor scenes, while reaction times (RTs) and accuracy measures were recorded. In adults, faster RTs for LSF and HSF images were consistently associated with a thicker cortex (parahippocampal cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and precentral and insula regions for LSF; parahippocampal cortex and fronto-marginal and supramarginal gyri for HSF). On the other hand, in children, faster RTs for HSF were associated with a thicker cortex (posterior cingulate, supramarginal and calcarine cortical regions), whereas faster RTs for LSF were associated with a thinner cortex (subcallosal and insula regions). Increased cortical thickness in adults and children could correspond to an expansion mechanism linked to visual scene processing efficiency. In contrast, lower cortical thickness associated with LSF efficiency in children could correspond to a pruning mechanism reflecting an ongoing maturational process, in agreement with the view that LSF efficiency continues to be refined during childhood. This differing pattern between children and adults appeared to be particularly significant in anterior regions of the brain, in line with the proposed existence of a postero-anterior gradient of brain development. Taken together, our results highlight the dynamic brain processes that allow children and adults to perceive a visual natural scene in a coherent way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]