Schedule of Events | Symposia

Developmental changes in neural dynamics serving fluid reasoning.

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Sarah Hunter¹ (sarah.hunter@boystown.org), Haley Pulliam², Monica Clarke-Smith³, OgheneTejiri Smith⁴, Brittany Taylor⁵; ¹Institute for Human Neuroscience, ²Boys Town National Research Hospital

Fluid intelligence (Gf) is the ability to problem solve when faced with unfamiliar circumstances or concepts. Gf and its underlying neural substrates rapidly mature during childhood and adolescence, though the maturation of the neural dynamics underpinning Gf have seldom been studied. Therefore, the present study investigated the development of these oscillatory dynamics in 104 youth ages 8-to-15 years old (M = 12.34 years ± 2.23; 53 males) who completed an abstract reasoning task during magnetoencephalography. Time-frequency spectrograms indicated significant theta (4-8 Hz, 0-250ms), alpha/beta (10-16 Hz, 450-1000ms), and gamma (80-96 Hz, 100-475ms) activity during the task. Significant windows underwent source reconstruction with a beamformer yielding whole-brain maps of oscillatory activity. These maps were subject to whole-brain regressions to determine the interactive effects of sex and age on neural dynamics serving abstract reasoning. We detected multispectral age- and sex-specific effects across the cortex. Youth exhibited stronger oscillatory responses as a function of age in the bilateral superior parietal lobules (alpha/beta, gamma), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (gamma), superior insula (alpha/beta), and lingual gyrus (theta), and weaker oscillatory responses in the left superior temporal gyrus (alpha/beta), (βs= -.39 - .55). We also detected sexually-dimorphic patterns of development in the left inferior frontal gyrus (β= -.49), such that females exhibited a weaker theta response with increasing age, whereas males showed stronger theta activity across development. These data suggest that there is robust maturation of the neural dynamics serving Gf well into adolescence, with key differences in development between biologically male and female youth.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Development & aging