Recent advances in MRI technology have enabled precise measurements of functional interactions between brain regions and have provided significant insights into human brain development [7], [8], [67]. In this study, we applied a graph theoretical analysis on the functional connectivities in the whole brains of healthy children and found that several global network parameters (e.g., NC, SW, and LE) showed significant increases with age. The age-related differences in the global network properties were mainly attributed to the increases in the clustering or local efficiency with development, whereas the global efficiency was not significantly related to age. The higher local efficiency has been suggested to be associated with the modularized information processing among topologically nearby regions [1], [3]. Functionally specialized brain regions typically show high clustering due to an abundance of connections to other areas with the same functional specialization (e.g., visual processing) and in the same anatomical neighborhood (e.g., the occipital cortex) [68]. Thus, our results supported the notion that the functionally related regions or brain systems (e.g., the default mode system and the control system) emerge during development in
