Development of relational reasoning during adolescence

Well, look who hasn't blogged in a really long time!  This gal!

Ah yes, there are all the regular excuses, holidays, families visiting, other work to do, dogs to play with, facebook posts to comment on and, well, you get my point.

But we're back in regular term time now and the Bunge Lab had its first lab meeting yesterday in which we discussed this paper on the development of relational reasoning during adolescence.  It is a very similar task to the one we use in the NORA study and is based on Kalina Christoff's task, first published in this paper in 2003 (as far as I can make out).

The main hypothesis behind the task is that there is an area in anterior prefrontal cortex that works harder during relational integration, than the consideration of single relations. Unfortunately the paper isn't open access so I can't add any figures to this post to explain the task better :(

This paper looked at how different brain areas are recruited by adolescents and adults.  The whole group showed activations which look very similar to other studies involving this task (including this one by Carter Wendelken, a research scientist in the Bunge Lab).  When they look at early adolescence, mid adolescent and adulthood they see that there are non-linear changes with age which are different for the three regions which are most consistently activated by the task (rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, medial superior frontal gyrus and anterior insular/frontal operculum).

The study also incorporates brain structure into their analyzes, investigating whether differences in white matter or gray matter volume in these three regions of interest can explain the differences in functional activation throughout development. They find mixed results, sometimes structure does explain the differences, other regions and age groups don't show the same effect.

It's going to be really exciting for us to see how our study population is similar or different to this paper's sample. It'll be great if we can add to some of their findings. Stay tuned for how our analyses work out!