Chunk #29 — Discussion — rs-fcMRI may reflect an interaction between the maturing neural substrate and the use of efficient pathways for general task completion — Changes in the neural substrate occur concurrently with changes in resting state functional connectivity
If the correlations we find in children already represent 7 years of experience-driven tuning, why should additional experience lead to a distributed solution? Under the current proposal, it is not clear then why resting state functional connectivity would change so dramatically over the reported age range. One could argue that the general experiential environment and processing demands systematically change to encourage increasing use of long-range, distributed processing relationships. We believe, however, that at least part of the explanation lies in the interaction of these “environmental demands” with maturational changes of the neural substrate.
