Understanding normal brain development has crucial implications for the understanding of its deviance in neuro-developmental disorders. For example, in autism, studies have shown enhanced short-range connections and reduced long-range connections [91]. In ADHD, abnormal function and functional inter-regional connectivity has been observed in the same fronto-striatal and fronto-cortical networks [92, 93] that are reviewed here to develop progressively with age in their activation and inter-regional functional connectivity, which would be in line with a delay in structural brain maturation [94]. More recently applied multivariate pattern recognition analyses to fMRI may be more sensitive than traditional univariate analyses methods to study the evolution of distributed activation patterns across development and could be used to predict maturation in individual subjects [85]. These methods could potentially distinguish children at different developmental stages of cognitive maturation, which may be relevant to establish whether psychopathologies suffer from a maturational delay, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) [95] or from a deviance from normal development.
