Our analysis of functional connectivity changes with wiring distance provides strong evidence that development is characterized by simultaneous reduction of short-range connectivity and strengthening of long-range connectivity. This suggests a process of greater functional segregation in children and greater functional integration in young-adults at the whole-brain level, not just in circumscribed nodes of the attentional control [27] and default node networks [28]. In contrast to the 90 cortical and subcortical nodes, based on whole-brain parcellation [82], used in our study, Fair and colleagues [27],[28] focused their analysis on 39 distinct cortical regions involved in task-control and default-mode networks. Whereas the lack of correspondence between specific brain regions in the two studies makes a detailed comparison difficult, our findings are, nevertheless, consistent with distributed changes in these two large-scale networks reported by Fair and colleagues. Methodologically, our studies are an improvement over prior studies because we used continuous resting state fMRI data, rather than resting state data extracted from intertask rest periods, uncontaminated by cognitive tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that simultaneous weakening of short-range connections and strengthening of long-range connections
