Dear All,

The Faculty of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE is pleased to invite you all for the upcoming lecture of Cognitive Seminar (https://sites.google.com/site/eltekognitiv/home/elte-kognitiv-szeminariu) by:

Ilona Kovács (Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Pázmány Péter Catholic

University Adolescent Development Research Group, Budapest, webpage):

BETA: Biological and Experience-based Trajectories in Adolescent brain development

date: 22nd January 2019, 14:00

place: room 403, Institute of Psychology ELTE, 46 Izabella street, Budapest, 1064

Abstract:

The adolescent brain continues to mature well into the 20s, with neural circuitry underlying executive functions among the last to mature. On the other hand, there is no consensus with respect to the developmental pace of other different cognitive functions. A usual pitfall of adolescent studies is that individual differences in puberty onset times are difficult to take into consideration against chronological age. The variability between individuals in the timing of the onset and in the pace of progression of puberty is very large, and the onset age can vary by as much as 6 years in typical development. There is a great uncertainty in both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies about the sheer contribution of genetically preprogrammed maturation versus experience.

The BETA (Biological and Experience-based Trajectories in Adolescent brain development) project aims to dissociate biological and chronological age for the first time, and to investigate their role independently in adolescent cognitive functioning and in the development of large-scale functional cortical networks. We assess biological maturity of a large sample of children and adolescents by a computerized estimation of their bone age, and then we select two cohorts of subjects for further investigations. Subjects are at the same biological maturity level, however different in chronological age in the “experience” cohort.

In the “maturation” cohort, subjects are the same age, but they are different in maturity (or bone-age). We show that biological maturation as estimated by bone age and life-time experience related to chronological age are dissociable factors in adolescent brain development, and that their exact role is different depending on the studied developmental event.