A significant finding that emerged from recent graph theoretic studies in children is that developing functional networks are in some respects quite similar to adult networks. Graph theoretic measures indicate that brain networks throughout development possess community structure (Fair et al., 2009), and are organized in manners that facilitate efficiency on local and global network scales (Fair et al., 2009; Fransson et al., 2010; Supekar et al., 2009). The limited comparisons made of such network properties have reported no differences between children and adults. This set of observations suggests that network structures in children ought not to be viewed as simple precursors to adult-like configurations, but should be given serious attention as intact, operational functional networks with some similar properties but a fundamentally different structure than adult networks. The field awaits confirmation and extension of these findings with rigorous, comprehensive studies of brain functional networks across development.
