Aperiodic electroencephalography (EEG) activity is hypothesized to index biological mechanisms that underpin brain functioning. This longitudinal study characterized the developmental trajectories of the aperiodic slope (i.e., aperiodic exponent) and offset from infancy to 7 years of age in a US community sample (N = 391, 46.5% female,…

Identifying the neural processes that underlie the association between children's early adverse experiences and cognitive development could inform more effective intervention strategies. The goal of the current study (data collected 2015-2021) was to examine relations among early experiences at 6 months, electroencephalography (EEG) theta power at…

Executive control (EC) emerges in the first year of life, with the ability to inhibit prepotent responses (inhibitory control [IC]) and to flexibly readapt (cognitive flexibility [CF]) steadily improving. Simultaneously, electrophysiological brain activity undergoes profound reconfiguration, which has been linked to individual variability in EC.…

It is well established that parent-child dyadic synchrony (e.g., mutual emotions, behaviors) can support development across cognitive and socioemotional domains. The advent of simultaneous two-brain "hyperscanning" (i.e., measuring the brain activity of two individuals at the same time) allows further insight into dyadic "neural…

Although a growing literature has linked extreme psychosocial adversity in early development to brain structure and function, recent studies highlight that differences in socioeconomic resources may also affect brain development. In this article, we describe research linking variation in neighborhood context and parenting practices, two contexts…

Preterm birth poses a major public health challenge, with significant and heterogeneous developmental impacts. Latent profile analysis was applied to the National Institutes of Health Toolbox performance of 1891 healthy prematurely born children from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study (970 boys, 921 girls; 10.00 ± 0.61 years;…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies with adults provide evidence that functional brain networks, including the default mode network and frontoparietal network, underlie executive functioning (EF). However, given the challenges of using fMRI with infants and young children, little work has assessed the developmental trajectories of…

Research Findings: Early digital experience (e.g. screen time and digital use) is believed to impact children's brain development, functionally and structurally, but this impact has not been systematically reviewed. In this scoping review, we synthesized and evaluated 33 collected studies on children's digital use (ages 0-12) and their associated…

Children's white matter development is driven by experience, yet it remains poorly understood how it is shaped by attending formal education. A small number of studies compared children before and after the start of formal schooling to understand this, yet they do not allow to separate maturational effects from schooling-related effects. A clever…

Arithmetic ability is critical for daily life, academic achievement, career development, and future economic success. Individual differences in arithmetic skills among children and adolescents are related to variations in brain structures. Most existing studies have used hypothesis-driven region of interest analysis. To identify distributed brain…

Previous research suggests that book reading and screen time have contrasting effects on language and brain development. However, few studies have explicitly investigated whether children's brains function differently during these two activities. The present study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain response in 28…

This study uses CiteSpace, a bibliometric and visualization-analysis tool, to present a systematic analysis of literature in the Web of Science database on physiological-synchrony evoked by attentional engagement. It reviews the publication timeframe, authorship, keywords, and leading institutions and regions, along with burst terms and highly…

Infancy is a period of significant change for both the brain and behavior. During the first two years of life, the brain experiences an explosion of synaptic connections and myelination, alongside rapid development in motor, linguistic, and social behavioral abilities. Understanding the relationship between brain development and behavioral…

Given the substantial increase in children attending center-based childcare over the past decades, the consequences of center-based childcare for children's development have gained more attention in developmental research. However, the relation between center-based childcare and children's neurocognitive development remains relatively…

The neural representation of visual-spatial functions has traditionally been ascribed to the right hemisphere, but little is known about these representations in children, including whether and how lateralization of function changes over the course of development. Some studies suggest bilateral activation early in life that develops toward…