Article: NIH-funded study shows children recycle brain regions when acquiring new skills
Source: Stanford University, via National Eye Institute
Published: June 17, 2021
A longitudinal study by researchers at Stanford University investigated cortical recycling in the visual cortex during childhood development. The study involved about 30 children ages 5 to 12 at their first MRI and followed with subsequent MRIs over 1 to 5 years. Specifically, the researchers used functional MRI to study areas in the ventral temporal cortex (VTC) that are stimulated by the recognition of images, using a sampling of ten categories of images ranging from faces and body parts to objects, words, and places. They found that areas in childhood (5-9-year-olds) that responded to images of limbs later responded to words and faces during adolescence. The researchers emphasized that increases in face- and word-selectivity in the VTC were directly linked to decreases in limb selectivity, providing surprising evidence of cortical selectivity being repurposed from one category to another, in contrast to prior theories of childhood brain development. The first author of the study comments, “This challenges a theory of cortical development, which states that new
representations, like emerging regions involved in word recognition,
are sculpted on previously uncommitted cortex. Our study suggests that
during childhood, cortical selectivity can change from one category to
another.” Word recognition becomes increasingly relevant as children learn to read. Research into vision development in the brain could thus inform strategies related to learning.
My rating of this study: ⭐⭐⭐
Nordt M, Gomez J, Natu VS, et al. "Cortical recycling in high-level visual cortex during childhood development." Nature Human Behavior. 17 June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01141-5
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