The “local to distributed” developmental trajectory, discussed above, seems to be driven by an abundance of local, short range connections that generally decrease in strength over age as well as distant, long range connections that generally increase in strength over age. Given the more prevalent short-range connections in children, we expected a more lattice-like structure, with high clustering coefficients and relatively high path lengths. The results, however, clearly indicated that path lengths were near those of equivalent random graphs, and that the child functional networks are already organized as small world networks.
