DEVELOPMENTAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

What happens in the brain that allows our cognitive abilities to develop?
This is a question that has begun to take centre stage in developmental psychology in
recent years. But why should we concern ourselves with the brain? Do we really learn
anything useful by considering how neurons and regions of nervous tissue underpin
our developing abilities? Psychologists, including developmental psychologists,
have not always considered biological processes to be very relevant in
understanding cognitive abilities (e.g., Mehler, Morton, & Jusczyk, 1984). Perhaps
we can understand development simply by considering the interaction
between inherited abilities and the environment to which we are exposed,
without having to think about how this works in the brain. Nonetheless, over
the last 20 years or so, developmental psychology has become more and more
influenced by methods and ideas from the field of cognitive neuroscience.
Developmental researchers, as well as being interested in brain development for its
own sake, now frequently argue that we cannot fully understand development
without understanding the role of the brain and biological processes more
generally in development (Johnson & DeHaan, 2015). The crucial point to
appreciate here is that the brain and nervous system are the organs of our
psychological abilities and traits. As such, any developmental changes in the
biology of these organs have important implications for the development of
psychological abilities. In this section, we will see how this argument can be
justified. However, let’s first discuss the development of perhaps the most crucial
part of the brain underlying the development of cognitive abilities: the cerebral cortex.

THE CEREBRAL CORTEX

The largest portion of the human brain consists of the two connected hemispheres
that make up the cerebrum, a mass of tissue that governs mental functions which
humans share with other vertebrate animals (e.g., sensory perception, motor abilities
and memory) as well as functions which are thought to be particular to humans (e.g.,
speech and self-awareness). The covering layer of the human cerebrum, the cerebral
cortex (Figure 5-17), is a highly folded surface containing about 90% of the brain’s cell
bodies. In the last few years, significant progress has been made in learning
how these most sophisticated areas of the central nervous system are
involved in cognitive functions, such as seeing, hearing, smelling, moving,
planning, and speaking. In many cases specific sensory, emotional, and
cognitive functions have been traced to particular regions of the cerebral
cortex.

Figure 5-17 The cortex The cortex is divided

into four lobes – frontal, temporal, occipital and
parietal – and specific areas within these lobes
typically specialize in particular functions. For
instance, the left hemisphere of the cortex
(the hemisphere which is shown here), is
generally associated with the processing of
language, whereas the right hemisphere
(not seen here) plays a greater role in visual
and spatial processing.

BRAIN MATURATION

There is an orderly sequence of brain development during infancy and childhood.

We know from neuroanatomical studies that the parts of the brain that are
furthest from the spinal cord develop last. The cerebral hemispheres, which
are right at the top of the brain, in fact develop much slower in humans than they do
in other primates (Johnson & De Haan, 2015). As the cerebral hemispheres
mature, a range of cognitive functions unfold.

In the visual cortex, synaptogenesis takes

place, multiplying the number of
synapses per neuron by six times within
the first two postnatal years. In
accordance with this, infants’ visual
capabilities are greatly enhanced; for
example, they become more able to resolve
fine detail in their visual field up to about 6
months of age (Dobson & Teller, 1978), and they also become more skilled at
following visual stimuli with their eyes (‘smooth tracking’) and orienting their
eyes towards visual events (Johnson & De Haan, 2015; Nelson, Thomas, & de
Haan, 2006).

The last areas of the cerebrum to develop are the prefrontal areas. The prefrontal
cortex is particularly involved in a range of skills which are often grouped
together under the umbrella term ‘executive function’. Executive functions
include planning actions, inhibiting behaviours, and working memory. In the
prefrontal cortex, the main maturational changes beyond 2 years of age are
not synaptogenesis, but rather synaptic pruning and myelination (as covered
in the previous section, synaptic pruning is a process in which synapses are
removed, and in myelination the axons of neurons are insulated to make
them more efficient. In line with the protracted maturation of prefrontal areas,
it is perhaps unsurprising by now that executive functions have perhaps the
longest developmental trajectories across childhood, with, for instance,
working memory abilities developing substantially during toddlerhood, and
continuing well into early adolescence (Blakemore, 2008; Conklin et al., 2007;
Crone, 2009). In Chapter 10 we will discuss the development of executive functions in
more detail.

So, what we are seeing here is that our cognitive abilities seem to develop in
line with the maturation of the specific brain areas which govern those
abilities. It seems that the biological process of brain maturation constrains
the development of our cognitive and behavioural abilities. As such,
developmental cognitive neuroscientists have argued that understanding biological
development is crucial to understanding how, when, and why our cognitive
abilities and psychological traits emerge.

BRAIN SPECIALIZATION
As we have just seen, the frontal lobes are specialized for certain tasks,
including inhibition, working memory and planning. This is an example of what is
referred to as functional specialization in
the brain. Through various methods,
including studies of brain-damaged
patients and functional brain-imaging
methods, neuroscientists have
identified in great detail how the
human brain is specialized into
different areas and networks of areas
that subserve specific functions.

One of the most obvious ways in which the

brain is subdivided into different
functional areas is in its division into
two halves, or brain hemispheres. The
left and right hemispheres, which are
connected by a set of nerve fibres
called the corpus callosum, are quite
different anatomically and, in many ways,
control different functions (Kandel et al.,
2000). Later we will describe how the left
hemisphere comes to control specifically
language-related skills, and the right hemisphere spatial abilities.

However, the brain is also subdivided into much more fine-grained functional regions.
Good examples of this are the fusiform face area (FFA) and the Parahippocampal
place area (PPA). Functional imaging studies have
indicated that the FFA is particularly important in
recognizing faces (Kanwisher et al., 1997), and the
PPA is involved in encoding information about
visual scenes (Epstein et al., 1999). Figure 5-18
shows where these areas are in the brain. While
researchers have disagreed over whether these areas
are specialized just for processing faces and places, they are certainly important in
these tasks.

Figure 5-18 The fusiform face area and the Parahippocampal place area (Shown here
in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.)

DEVELOPMENT OF FACE RECOGNITION IN THE BRAIN

How does this specialization come about? Some developmental theorists

consider these kinds of specialized brain areas to be the result of a strong
genetic influence (e.g., Sugita, 2009). On the other hand, others have argued that
brain specialization comes about because the perceptual input we receive
from our environment shapes the functional organization of the brain
(Johnson, 2011). We will discuss much of the research on the development of face
perception in Chapter 6, but here we will describe some of the brain imaging studies in
infants that have informed us about the development of the brain areas and networks
subserving this particularly important skill.

The brain changes substantially in both structure and function in infancy. In Chapter 4
we discussed how these considerable changes continue well into adolescence.

Early brain imaging studies of the development of functioning in the areas of the
brain that are specialized for face recognition used the event related potential
(ERP) technique, which measures electrical activity across the scalp in response to
sensory stimulation (in this case the presentation of a face).

Halit et al. (2003) examined changes in a specific brain wave (ERP) called the
N170, which in adults has been shown to be related to detection of faces
(specifically upright, human faces). Halit et al. (2003) showed that between 3 and 10
months of age, the N170 became progressively more responsive, specifically
to upright human faces. Theorists have suggested that these changes in the
N170 represent the gradual tuning of brain regions, which will later
subserve face recognition (including the FFA; Johnson, 2011).

Research using fMRI even shows that the networks of neurons involved in face
recognition continue to develop into early adolescence (Cohen-Kadosh et al.,
2013).
In many ways it seems unsurprising that the human brain would develop in a
way that specializes it for processing faces. Faces are a part of the social
environment of the human infant, and humans and their brains are
particularly adapted to live in social circumstances (Dunbar & Shultz, 2007;
Frith, 2007).

More recently, researchers have gone beyond faces to look at a wider range of ways
in which the brain is specialized for processing social information. In Box 5-3 we
describe a study by Lloyd-Fox et al. (2015), which has used a technique called
functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the specialization
of the infant brain for perceiving other people’s actions. As you will see the
authors’ findings seem to indicate that experience (in this case the infants’ own
experiences of acting on the world themselves) may play an important role in the
development of the specialized social brain.

BOX 5-3 Using near infrared spectroscopy to examine the developmental origins of
the social brain in infancy Source: Based on Lloyd-Fox et al. (2015).

Introduction:
Adults’ brains are specialized so that we can perceive and navigate our way around our social world
(Frith, 2007); for instance, they are specialized for recognizing faces and voices (e.g., Belin et al., 2000;
Cohen-Kadosh et al., 2011). A number of studies have examined the development of the brain regions
which govern infants’ emerging abilities to perceive faces and voices, but until recently few had
examined whether there are specialized regions in the infant
brain for perceiving human actions. When you watch someone
carrying out an action you can easily perceive their movements
and usually divine their intentions (i.e., you can figure out what
they are trying to do). When adults are shown visual
presentations of humans carrying out actions, this has
been found to be associated with activity in a range of brain
areas known as the Action Observation Network. Two
areas in particular in this network are the Posterior Superior
Temporal Sulcus (pSTS), and the Temporal-Parietal
Junction (TPJ), which sit adjacent to each other around the
border between the temporal and parietal lobes (see Figure 5-
16). Historically, it has proved difficult to localize functional
brain activity in human infants. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining (fMRI) is a difficult technique to
use with infants when they are awake, as they do not like the enclosed environment of the MRI scanner.
Infants do tolerate Electroencephalography (EEG), but this is not a good method for localizing brain
activity to small regions. Another more recently developed method for localizing brain activity in human
infants is functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) which is tolerated by infants and is superior to
EEG at localizing brain activity.

Method:
Lloyd-Fox and colleagues used fNIRS to measure blood flow to the cortex directly under a large array of
sensors with its centre placed over the infants’ temporal lobes. They tested 24 four- to six-month-old
infants (10 were female, a further 12 infants were tested but did not complete the study).
FNIRS measures blood flow to particular parts of the brain by (safely!) shining infrared light into the brain
and then measuring the reflection of that light by oxygenated and deoxygenated blood. As we explained
in Chapter 3, infrared light can pass through the skull and is shining into your brain all the time when you
sit in daylight. Lloyd-Fox et al. did this while the infants were watching videos of an actor moving their
hand (manual condition) or moving their eyes (eye-gaze condition) and measured the amount of
oxygenated and deoxygenated blood flow to the frontal lobe while this was happening. After the fNIRS
experiment, the authors also looked at how competent infants were at using their own hands to pick up
objects.

Results:

Lloyd-Fox et al. compared the infants’ brain activity in the manual and eye-gaze conditions to a ‘baseline’
condition in which the infants viewed pictures of cars. They found more activity to the eye gaze and
manual videos over a range of areas including at the fNIRS sensors which were placed over the pSTS and
the TPJ (the brain areas known to be important for action perception in adults; you can see these marked
by a green box in Figure 5-19). Importantly though, they found a significant correlation between the
infants’ ability to use their own hands to pick up objects and activity in pSTS-TPJ whilst the infants viewed
the actions in the manual condition. The better the infants were at picking up objects, the greater the
activity which was observed in pSTS-TPJ. This correlational relationship was not found for the eye-gaze
condition or over any other brain regions.
Discussion:
Lloyd-Fox et al. concluded that, at 4–6 months of age it is possible to measure the brain’s responses to
observed actions over a range of different areas including the specific areas known to be involved in
processing observed actions in adults (pSTS and TPJ). Interestingly, the extent to which these areas
respond to observed actions seems to depend on the expertise which any individual infant has at carrying
out actions themselves. Infants who were better at picking up objects showed stronger brain responses to
observed actions in pSTS-TPJ. This may indicate that in early life, our experience of acting on the world
plays a role in shaping how our brain becomes specialized for perceiving and interpreting others’ actions
when we observe them. We’ll discuss how experience is involved in brain specialization further down.

Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a method which is increasingly used to localize brain
activity in infants. In Chapter 3 we cover this method in more detail .

LEFT- AND RIGHT-HEMISPHERE SPECIALIZATION

hemispheric specialization begins early in life (Stephan et al., 2003).

The left hemisphere of the motor cortex controls simple movement in the right
side of the body, and the right hemisphere controls the body’s left side.
Lateralization describes the specialization of each hemisphere in specific
perceptual and cognitive tasks.

Handedness is to some extent determined by

hemispheric specialization
and lateralization. About 90%
of adults are right-handed
and a majority of young
infants show right-hand
dominance (Maurer & Maurer, 1988; Dean & Anderson, 1997); even 90% of fetuses
prefer to suck their right thumbs, which suggests that handedness develops in the
womb (Hepper, 2004).

The right hemisphere is generally thought to be specialized for processing visual-

spatial information, non-speech sounds like environmental noises, and the
perception of faces (Nelson & Bosquet, 2000; Nelson et al., 2006). When damage
occurs to the right side of the brain, people may have difficulty attending to a task
requiring visual-spatial perception, their drawing skills may deteriorate, they may
have trouble following a map or recognizing friends, and they may become
spatially disorientated (Carter, Freeman, & Stanton, 1995).

The right hemisphere is also involved in processing emotional information, as

shown by the fact that people with right-brain damage can have difficulty
interpreting facial expressions (Dawson, 1994; Nelson et al., 2006). At the same
time, right-hemisphere damage can sometimes make people indifferent to or even
cheerful about things that would normally upset them. This is thought to be because
the right hemisphere is activated in emotional expressions that cause the person to
turn away or withdraw from that environment, such as distress, disgust and fear.

In contrast, the left hemisphere is thought to be specialized to subserve the

expression of emotions with which we approach the external environment, such as
joy, interest, and anger (see Figure 5-20, as well as Fox, 1991; Davidson, 1994;
Demaree et al., 2005).
Both hemispheres are involved in emotional expression, but evidence indicates that
the left focuses on feelings that trigger an approach to the environment and
the right on feelings that cause a person to turn away from the environment.
Source: Adapted from Fox (1991)
The left hemisphere of the brain is associated with language processing; although
people with left-hemisphere damage can recognize a familiar song and tell a
stranger’s face from an old friend’s, they may have trouble understanding what is
being said to them or speaking clearly (Springer & Deutsch, 1993).

Evidence of a genetic basis of lateralization is seen in the positive association of

the degree of language lateralization between parents and children (Anneken
et al., 2004). Interestingly, however, in people who are deaf and use sign
language to communicate – a language that involves motor movements of the
hands – the right side of the brain can take over language functions (Neville &
Bruer, 2001; Sanders et al., 2007).

These and other findings demonstrate that the brain is capable of adapting
to external change. If brain injury occurs in the early years of life, because the
young brain is not fully developed and hemispheric specialization is not yet
complete, infants and young children often recover their functioning (Fox et
al., 1994; Stiles et al., 2012). For instance, when the left hemisphere is damaged in
early infancy, a child can still develop language ability close to normal (Stiles et al.,
2012). Even in adults, there is still a great deal of modifiability, and lost
function can often be partially recovered through treatment (Briones et al.,
2004).

The degree to which a newborn’s brain is prone to use one hemisphere rather
than the other for processing speech (i.e., lateralized) has consequences for the
child’s language ability three years later. Infants whose left hemisphere
differentiates among speech sounds and whose right hemisphere
differentiates among non-speech sounds exhibit better language skills at
age 3 (Molfese & Molfese, 1985; Hoff, 2005). However, infants’ brain responses to
hearing speech and matching it with concrete objects are multidimensional
and involve a variety of processes, some of which are lateralized and some of
which are not (Molfese et al., 1990). Clearly, brain functioning between the
hemispheres is highly complex and requires continued study.

Maturation or plasticity?

An important question for developmental cognitive neuroscientists concerns how the

brain develops. Much evidence, as we have just described, points to protracted
development of the brain and nervous system. But is this development simply
growth (or ‘maturation’) according to an unfolding genetic plan, or is the
environment and other experiences involved in shaping changes in brain
structure and function? Changes in the brain as a result of experience are
referred to as brain plasticity. Just as we can see all across the discipline of
developmental psychology, contemporary developmental cognitive
neuroscientists are fairly uniform in their acceptance that both maturational
and environmental factors are important in brain development. The question
is one of emphasis and determining exactly how inheritance and experience
interact to shape the biological machinery of our psychological abilities. It is
difficult to determine whether changes in brain function are due to
maturation or experience. Take face recognition. The changes in the N170 and
the networks of neurons involved in face recognition could be due to either the
influence of sensory input on brain structure and function, or it could be that
these changes represent the influence of the maturation of the various brain
areas involved in face processing.

Some research on human infants demonstrates the brain’s plasticity. As we

have already heard, infants with significant brain damage manage to recover well.
Some have even developed language after losing their entire left
hemisphere (Lenneberg, 1967; Stiles et al., 2012). However, perhaps some of the
clearest clues that the environment plays an important role come from animal
research, which shows that the size, structure and even the biochemistry of
the brain can be modified by experience. There is now a great deal of evidence
that the kind of environment which animals are exposed to can have
measurable effects on their brains. In particular, if rats and mice are exposed
to more complex and interesting (enriched) environments, this has a number
of positive outcomes for their brains (Garthe et al., 2016; Pysanenko et al., 2018).
 This kind of work on the effects of enriched environments was pioneered by
Rosenzweig and his colleagues (Benloucif et al., 1995; Rosenzweig, 2003). They
placed young rats in two very different environments. The ‘enriched’
environment consisted of large, brightly lit, communal cages with wheels,
ladders, platforms, and other toys that were changed daily to ensure that the
rats had a steady stream of new learning experiences. In the ‘impoverished’
environment, each rat was alone in a bare, isolated cage located in a quiet,
dimly lit room. When the researchers compared the brains of the young rats after
nearly three months, they discovered that the weight of the cerebral cortex,
which controls higher-order processes, was about 4% heavier for the rats in
the enriched environment, and the weight of the occipital region, which
controls vision, was 6% heavier.

One reason the enriched rats had bigger brains was that enriched environments
tend to increase the complexity of neurons as measured by the number of
dendrites (Jones & Greenough, 1996; Black et al., 1998). A greater number of
dendrites means that more synapses formed with other neurons, which in turn
means that more information can be sent via these synaptic connections. At
the same time, the activity of key chemicals in the brain, especially in the
cerebral cortex, increases significantly as a result of enriched rearing
environments.

It may not be only the young who can benefit from enriched experiences.
Adult rats and mice exposed to impoverished or enriched environments after being
reared in normal laboratory conditions show changes like those in young rats
(Black et al., 1998; Brione et al., 2004; Garthe et al., 2016). Still, the effects of
differential experience tend to be greater during the earlier periods of life.

Lack of stimulation or exposure to traumatic events, in contrast, can damage

the brain and cause it to malfunction. In abused children, both the cortex and the
limbic system – centers in the brain that are involved with emotions and infant–
parent attachment – are 20% to 30% smaller and have fewer synapses than in
non-abused children (Perry, 1997)

Techniques for studying brain function and activity, such as fMRI and EEG (see
Chapter 3), also show the effects on the developing brain of early deprivation.
One programme of research, led by Nelson and colleagues (Nelson, 2007; Troller-
Renfree et al., 2018) has examined the effects on the brain of the profound
deprivation experienced by children placed in Romanian orphanages around the fall of
the tyrant Nicolae Ceaus‚escu in 1989. Studies of such unfortunate children (many of
whom are now adults of course) show that this deprivation results in reduced
connectivity or communication between a range of regions of the brain
(Eluvathingal et al., 2006), as well as reduced cortical brain activity during tasks
such as memory tasks or face processing (Parker et al., 2005). Not only do these
studies illustrate the malleability of the developing brain and its
responsiveness to environmental conditions; they also help inform about the
circumstances which can lead to developmental improvements in deprived
individuals. Troller-Renfree et al. (2018) report on an investigation of the effects
of foster-care intervention on deprived children in Bucharest, Romania, identifying
neural markers which can help explain why some children are resilient to
deprivation and able to benefit from intervention while others are not.

SUMMARY

During the course of development, the genotype interacts with the environment in
complex ways to produce the phenotype. Developmental scientists study the
phenotypic expression of individual physical and behavioural characteristics in an
effort to understand how genes and the environment interact to produce each unique
human being. In this chapter we have described how the genetic code is first created
in a new human life. We then went on to describe how our genetic code comes to be
expressed via interactions with other genes and environmental influences.

Behavioural geneticists attempt to understand how the behaviours we produce across

our lifespan are the result of interactions between our heredity and environmental
influences. The concept of the range of reaction helps shed light on how environments
and genes interact. According to this concept, heredity does not rigidly fix behaviour
but instead establishes a range of possible developmental outcomes that may occur in
response to different environments. Not only does the environment influence genetic
expression, but genes also influence the environments to which people are exposed.

Behavioural geneticists also ask why significant differences exist in individual

development. Commonly, researchers examine family members with known degrees
of biological relatedness, such as monozygotic and dizygotic twins, and adopted
children. From these groups they can draw conclusions about the extent to which a
given trait is heritable.

Following on from this discussion about the process of inheritance and the influence
of inheritance with the environment we went on to describe how this might happen at
a biological level in the brain. We first described the structural development of the
brain in utero and following birth, and then how the field of developmental cognitive
neuroscience has addressed how the brain comes to be specialized in terms of its
functioning across early life. Brain imaging studies have shed a great deal of light on
this question.

While the brain is undoubtedly shaped

substantially by our genetic inheritance, the
environment plays a critical role in brain
development. The brain has great plasticity,
which allows it to compensate for defects or
damage in one area or even one whole
hemisphere. The fact that the environment
influences our development at all levels of
biological explanation, in gene expression,
and in structural and functional brain
development means that development is a
process in which our inheritance interacts with our environments in truly complex
ways.One of the most obvious ways in which the brain is subdivided into different
functional areas is in its division into two halves, or brain hemispheres. The
left and right hemispheres, which are connected by a set of nerve fibres called
the corpus callosum, are quite different anatomically and, in many ways, control
different functions (Kandel et al., 2000). Later we will describe how the left
hemisphere comes to control specifically language-related skills, and the right
hemisphere spatial abilities.

However, the brain is also subdivided into much more fine-grained functional regions.
Good examples of this are the fusiform face area (FFA) and the Parahippocampal
place area (PPA). Functional imaging studies have indicated that the FFA is
particularly important in recognizing faces (Kanwisher et al., 1997), and the PPA
is involved in encoding information about visual scenes (Epstein et al., 1999).
Figure 5-18 shows where these areas are in the brain. While researchers have
disagreed over whether these areas are specialized just for processing faces and
places, they are certainly important in these tasks.

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1.1 MATURATION VS. PLASTICITY: UNDERSTANDING BRAIN

DEVELOPMENT

 The Central Question in Brain Development

Developmental cognitive neuroscientists face a fundamental question about how the brain develops.
While evidence points to protracted development of the brain and nervous system, researchers
debate whether this development occurs primarily through:

 Maturation: Growth according to an unfolding genetic plan

 Plasticity: Changes in brain structure and function resulting from experience and
environmental influences

Contemporary scientists generally agree that both factors play important roles in brain development.
The challenge lies in determining precisely how inheritance and experience interact to shape the
biological foundations of psychological abilities.

 The Challenge of Distinguishing Causes

It is often difficult to determine whether changes in brain function stem from maturation or
experience. For example, changes in the N170 component and neural networks involved in face
recognition could be attributed to either:
  Sensory input influencing brain structure and function
 Natural maturation of brain areas involved in face processing

 Evidence of Brain Plasticity in Humans

Research on human infants demonstrates remarkable brain plasticity:

 Infants with significant brain damage often recover well

 Some children have developed language even after losing their entire left hemisphere
 These cases suggest the brain can reorganize itself in response to damage

 Animal Research on Environmental Influences

Some of the clearest evidence for environmental influence comes from animal studies showing that
brain size, structure, and biochemistry can be modified by experience.

 Enriched Environment Studies

Pioneering work by Rosenzweig and colleagues placed young rats in two different environments:

 Enriched environment: Large, bright, communal cages with wheels, ladders, platforms,
and toys changed daily to provide new learning experiences
 Impoverished environment: Isolated, bare cages in quiet, dimly lit rooms

After nearly three months, researchers found:

 The cerebral cortex in rats from enriched environments was approximately 4% heavier
 The occipital region (controlling vision) was 6% heavier

 Neuronal Changes Due to Enrichment

Enriched environments increase neuronal complexity:

 Greater number of dendrites in neurons

 More synaptic connections between neurons
 Enhanced information transmission capability
 Increased activity of key brain chemicals, especially in the cerebral cortex

 Benefits Across the Lifespan

Environmental enrichment benefits extend beyond early development:

 Adult rats exposed to enriched environments after normal rearing show similar positive
changes
 However, the effects tend to be more pronounced during earlier periods of life
 Negative Effects of Deprivation
Lack of stimulation or exposure to trauma can damage the brain:

 Effects of Abuse

In abused children:

 Both the cortex and limbic system are 20-30% smaller

 Fewer synapses compared to non-abused children
 Affected areas include brain centers involved with emotions and infant-parent attachment

 Studies of Romanian Orphans

Research on children from Romanian orphanages shows profound effects of early deprivation:

 Reduced connectivity between various brain regions

 Decreased cortical brain activity during memory tasks and face processing
 These studies demonstrate the brain's malleability and responsiveness to environmental
conditions

 Intervention and Resilience

Research on foster-care interventions for deprived Romanian children has identified neural markers
that help explain:

 Why some children show resilience to deprivation

 Why some can benefit from intervention while others cannot
 Conclusion
Brain development reflects a complex interplay between genetic programming and environmental
influences. While maturation provides the foundation and timeline for development, environmental
factors significantly shape neural structure and function. The evidence strongly suggests that
optimal brain development requires both proper genetic expression and enriching experiences,
particularly during critical developmental periods.