increased activation in children relative to adults in some frontal regions, which has been associated with increased effort for task performance [55, 87]. Functional connectivity studies [27, 29, 31, 33, 34] show that not only the activation but also the functional connectivity of task-relevant brain networks increases with age. Resting state fMRI studies furthermore show that this progressive increase in activation and functional connectivity in task-relevant brain networks is accompanied by progressively stronger deactivation of the task-anti-correlated default mode network [30]. Furthermore, there is consistent evidence that brain development is associated with progressively stronger integration in the form of long-range connections between regions with diminishing short-range connections (i.e., more segregation) suggesting a shift from “local to distributed” organisation [36, 37, 80, 81, 85].
