In the last few years much attention has been given to how subcortical systems like the striatum and the prefrontal cortex interact to give rise to aberrant behavior observed in adolescents. Developmentally, cortical association areas including the prefrontal and parietal cortex thought to subserve age-related improvement in cognitive control[26-30] undergo delayed maturation[31-33]. These studies provide insights into the role of these regions in cognitive control processes across development, though the delineation of circuit-level development has been less clear. Using network modeling techniques, Fair and colleagues recently mapped the developmental trajectory of cognitive control networks using small-world network modeling[34]. From childhood to adulthood, the functional interactions between regions within a frontoparietal network and cingulate-lateral prefrontal network show lessening of short-range functional connections with neighboring regions and strengthening long-distance connections between distal regions. These novel network-level findings bolster the claim that cognitive maturation occurs not in unitary structures but in the connectivity and interactions between structures(e.g., [35]).
