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•Environmental exposures are linked to cognitive outcomes like attention deficits.•Home radon exposure has seldom been studied for its effects aside from cancer.•We assessed links between home radon exposure and neural dynamics serving attention.•Youths with greater radon exposure showed atypical attention network recruitment.•Radon exposure also robustly modulated expected neurodevelopmental trajectories. Radon is a naturally occurring gas that contributes significantly to radiation in the environment and is the second leading cause of lung cancer globally. Previous studies have shown that other environmental toxins have deleterious effects on brain development, though radon has not been studied as thoroughly in this context. This study examined the impact of home radon exposure on the neural oscillatory activity serving attention reorientation in youths. Fifty-six participants (ages 6–14 years) completed a classic Posner cuing task during magnetoencephalography (MEG), and home radon levels were measured for each participant. Time-frequency spectrograms indicated stronger theta (3–7 Hz, 300–800 ms), alpha (9–13 Hz, 400–900 ms), and beta responses (14–24 Hz, 400–900 ms) during the task relative to baseline. Source reconstruction of each significant oscillatory response was performed, and validity maps were computed by subtracting the task conditions (invalidly cued – validly cued). These validity maps were examined for associations with radon exposure, age, and their interaction in a linear regression design. Children with greater radon exposure showed aberrant oscillatory activity across distributed regions critical for attentional processing and attention reorientation (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex). Generally, youths with greater radon exposure exhibited a reverse neural validity effect in almost all regions and showed greater overall power relative to peers with lesser radon exposure. We also detected an interactive effect between radon exposure and age where youths with greater radon exposure exhibited divergent developmental trajectories in neural substrates implicated in attentional processing (e.g., bilateral prefrontal cortices, superior temporal gyri, and inferior parietal lobules). These data suggest aberrant, but potentially compensatory neural processing as a function of increasing home radon exposure in areas critical for attention and higher order cognition.

•Environmental exposures have been linked to neurocognitive dysfunction.•Home radon exposure’s impact on cognitive function has not been well characterized.•We examined links between radon exposure and dynamics of cognitive control in youth.•Youths with greater exposure showed aberrant oscillations with attentional control.•Radon exposure modulated expected neural and behavioral developmental trajectories. Radon is a prevalent, naturally occurring gas which contributes to radiation within the environment and is the second-leading cause of lung cancer worldwide. Although many environmental toxins have been linked to maladaptive neurodevelopmental outcomes in children and adolescents, radon has seldom been examined for its effects on the developing brain. This study aimed to investigate the effects of chronic home radon exposure on top-down neural processes of cognitive control in youths. Fifty-nine participants (aged 6–14 years) completed a Simon interference task during magnetoencephalography (MEG), and radon levels were measured in their homes. MEG data were transformed into time-frequency space and significant oscillatory responses relative to baseline were imaged condition-wise and then subtracted to isolate the Simon interference effect (i.e., Simon-control). Whole-brain linear regressions indicated that children with greater radon exposure exhibited aberrant oscillatory activity in widespread networks related to attentional control. We also found that radon exposure moderated the developmental trajectory of theta and gamma oscillations underlying selective attention in frontoparietal cortices and other regions. Further, mediation analyses showed that the neural interference effects within cerebellar and extended motor cortices mediated the relationship between radon exposure and behavioral outcomes. Additionally, we found the mediating effects of neural interference within the left superior frontal gyrus and precuneus on the relationship between age and task accuracy were dependent on radon exposure. These data are among the first to demonstrate radon-related disruptions to the normative development of the neural substrates supporting cognitive control processes. Further, these disruptions have direct implications on observable behavior.

•Motor control improves and association cortices mature in childhood and adolescence.•68 youth performed a motor sequencing task during magnetoencephalography (MEG).•Prefrontal beta oscillations weaken with age when planning complex sequences.•Planning-related beta becomes stronger in posterior cortices during development.•Gamma becomes stronger with age in occipital and weaker in temporal cortices. Primary motor areas in the brain mature relatively early in development, yet the control of complex movements improves through early adulthood. Neural oscillations in higher-order regions are refined in adolescence and contribute to executive processes important for complex motor control, but the neural dynamics among these regions and primary motor cortices remain poorly understood in youth. We recorded magnetoencephalography during a motor sequencing task in 68 healthy youth from ten to 17 years of age. Significant changes in oscillatory activity relative to baseline were identified at the sensor level and source reconstructed with a beamformer. Whole-brain maps of beta (18–24 Hz) and gamma (74–84 Hz) oscillatory activity were subjected to voxel-wise repeated-measures ANCOVAs to identify brain areas in which the developmental trajectory of oscillatory power differed by sequence complexity (simple/complex) or motor stage (planning/execution). Beta activity in bilateral prefrontal cortices was weaker with age during the planning of complex movements. Across simple and complex conditions, older youth tended to have stronger beta in posterior areas during planning. Finally, gamma activity across conditions was stronger with age in occipital and weaker in temporal cortices. These results suggest that the functional refinement of association cortices may drive improvements in motor control by enabling more efficient attentional and inhibitory control during formulation of the motor plan.

•MR spectroscopic data was collected in the calcarine of 187 healthy aging adults.•GABA+ and Glx levels decreased with increasing age from 19 to 79 years-old.•Glx/GABA+ ratio also declined with increasing age, indicating disrupted E/I balance.•Age-related decreases in tNAA and increases in tCr, with no change in mI or tCho.•Age may affect neuro-physiology and -chemistry more than structure in visual cortex. Aging has been associated with widespread alterations in neural structure and function, but the underlying biochemical changes remain less understood despite recent neurophysiological work suggesting age-related alterations in the excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance. In the current study, we used ¹H-MRS to quantify levels of excitatory (Glx: glutamate + glutamine) and inhibitory (GABA+: GABA + macromolecules) neurotransmitters in the calcarine cortex in 187 healthy adults (19–79 years-old). These neurotransmitter estimates were used to compute the E/I ratio, and all three parameters were examined for aging effects. Given our large sample, we also conducted supplementary analyses to estimate the concentration of secondary metabolites commonly implicated in aging, including total creatine (tCr), total N-acetyl aspartate (tNAA), total choline (tCho), and myo-inositol (mI). Following best practices, metabolite concentrations were estimated relative to the unsuppressed water signal and corrected for voxel tissue composition (i.e., gray matter, white matter, CSF). Our results indicated significant age-related declines in both GABA+ and Glx, along with a reduction in the E/I ratio, suggesting diminished inhibitory and excitatory tone with advancing age. We also found a decline in tNAA and an increase in tCr with increasing age. In summary, we provide compelling evidence through one of the largest studies of its kind for age-related shifts in excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitter levels in the visual cortex. These changes may be critical to well-known, age-related physiological changes, including reduced neural selectivity and processing efficiency. These findings provide novel evidence that neurochemical alterations may contribute to the functional declines in cortical processing seen in healthy aging.

•The speed of visual object recognition is strongly affected by the scene background.•Prior research in this area has tended to use non-ecological scenes and tasks.•Seventy-one adults completed visual search of naturalistic scenes during fMRI.•Participants responded slower when the object was congruent with the background.•Greater dorsal frontoparietal activation observed in such object-congruent trials. Visual attention allows us to navigate complex environments by selecting behaviorally relevant stimuli while suppressing distractors, through a dynamic balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Extensive attention research has examined the object-context relationship. Some studies have shown that incongruent object-context associations are processed faster, likely due to semantic mismatch-related attentional capture, while others have suggested that schema-driven facilitation may enhance object recognition when the object and context are congruent. Beyond the conflicting findings, translation of this work to real world contexts has been difficult due to the use of non-ecological scenes and stimuli when investigating the object-context congruency relationship. To address this, we employed a goal-directed visual search task and naturalistic indoor scenes during functional MRI (fMRI). Seventy-one healthy adults searched for a target object, either congruent or incongruent within the scene context, following a word cue. We collected accuracy and response time behavioral data, and all fMRI data were processed following standard pipelines, with statistical maps thresholded at p < .05 following multiple comparisons correction. Our results indicated faster response times for incongruent relative to congruent trials, likely reflecting the so-called pop-out effect of schema violations in the incongruent condition. Our neural results indicated that congruent elicited greater activation than incongruent trials in the dorsal frontoparietal attention network and the precuneus, likely reflecting sustained top-down attentional control to locate the targets that blend more seamlessly into the context. These findings highlight the flexible interplay between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in real-world visual search, emphasizing the dominance of schema-guided top-down processes in congruent contexts and rapid attention capture in incongruent contexts.

Pediatric obesity rates have quadrupled in the United States, and deficits in higher-order cognition have been linked to obesity, though it remains poorly understood how deviations from normal body mass are related to the neural dynamics serving cognition in youth. Herein, we determine how age- and sex-adjusted measures of body mass index (zBMI) scale with neural activity in brain regions underlying fluid intelligence. Seventy-two youth aged 9–16 years underwent high-density magnetoencephalography while performing an abstract reasoning task. The resulting data were transformed into the time-frequency domain and significant oscillatory responses were imaged using a beamformer. Whole-brain correlations with zBMI were subsequently conducted to quantify relationships between zBMI and neural activity serving abstract reasoning. Our results reveal that participants with higher zBMI exhibit attenuated theta (4–8 Hz) responses in both the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left temporoparietal junction, and that weaker temporoparietal responses scale with slower reaction times. These findings suggest that higher zBMI values are associated with weaker theta oscillations in key brain regions and altered performance during an abstract reasoning task. Thus, future investigations should evaluate neurobehavioral function during abstract reasoning in youth with more severe obesity to identify the potential impact. Standardized indices of obesity are associated with alterations in neural oscillatory activity and functional connectivity in brain regions supporting abstract reasoning and fluid intelligence in typically developing youth.

Facial expressions are critical social cues for deciphering others’ emotional states and intentions. While the neural architecture supporting emotional face processing is well established, few studies have examined the developmental trajectory of the underlying oscillatory dynamics. Using magnetoencephalography in a large typically-developing sample (6–17 years-old), we quantified neural oscillations during gender judgments of angry, happy, and neutral faces. Alpha/beta responses to neutral faces increased with age in the posterior superior temporal cortices and decreased in the prefrontal cortex, indicating a shift toward posterior processing. Gamma oscillations increased with age for angry and neutral faces in the temporoparietal junction and fusiform, suggesting enhanced specialization for processing threatening and ambiguous stimuli. Happy faces elicited age-related gamma decreases in attention cortices, implying less attentional demand for positive faces. These findings offer the largest assessment to date of developmental changes in the neural dynamics supporting facial expression processing and mechanisms relevant to emerging psychopathology. Using magnetoencephalography, this study reveals developmental specialization of face perception networks for happy, angry, and neutral faces, highlighting distinct functional roles of alpha/beta and gamma oscillations during implicit emotional face processing.

Abstract Facial expressions convey important social information and can initiate behavioral change through the processing and understanding of emotions. However, while this ability is known to evolve throughout development, it remains unclear whether this ability differs between girls and boys or how other variables such as level of anxiety can modulate it. Furthermore, understanding the underlying neural mechanisms of facial expression processing and how they are linked by sex and anxiety during development is essential, as alterations in this processing have been associated with psychiatric disorders. Herein, 191 typically developing youth (6- to 15-years old) completed an implicit face processing task involving three facial expressions (angry, happy, and neutral) during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We conducted linear models on the fMRI data to investigate the impact sex and anxiety on brain responses to emotional faces, accounting for age. Our findings indicated a significant anxiety-by-sex interaction in a posterior network covering bilateral visual and medial temporal cortices during the happy > neutral contrast. Specifically, girls with higher anxiety showed weaker activation while boys showed the opposite pattern. These findings suggest that the inter-subject variability reported in typically developing individuals in response to facial emotions may be related to many factors, including sex and anxiety level.

Abstract Childhood and adolescence are sensitive periods for the refinement of increasingly complex executive and social functions. A particularly important skill is the ability to navigate and interpret interpersonal relationships, which is reflected in part by the maturation of distributed resting networks. However, the relationships between negative social perceptions in youth and long-term alterations in between-network connectivity are limited. To partially address this gap, we utilized longitudinal resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (N = 93) with social pain measures from the NIH Toolbox Emotion Battery to determine the links between negative social perceptions on the trajectory of connectivity between the salience, frontoparietal, and default mode networks in the triple network model of psychopathology. Higher scores of perceived hostility, but not perceived rejection, tended to increase functional connectivity between the salience and both frontoparietal and default mode networks over time. These results suggest that more direct forms of threat (hostility) may be more impactful than rejection (limited desired social interactions), highlighting the importance of a dimensional approach to understanding developmental trajectories. While these connectivity changes align with several aberrant connectivity signatures observed across mental health disorders, these phenotypes are not pathognomonic of psychopathology and may reflect adaptive mechanisms in the context of social adversity.

The pituitary gland (PG) plays a central role in the production and secretion of pubertal hormones, with documented links to the emergence and increase in mental health symptoms known to occur during adolescence. Although much of the literature has focused on examining whole PG volume, recent findings suggest that there are associations among pubertal hormone levels, including dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), subregions of the PG, and elevated mental health symptoms (e.g., internalizing symptoms) during adolescence. Surprisingly, studies have not yet examined associations among these factors and increasing transdiagnostic symptomology, despite DHEA being a primary output of the anterior PG. Therefore, the current study sought to fill this gap by examining whether anterior PG volume specifically mediates associations between DHEA levels and changes in dysregulation symptoms in an adolescent sample ( = 114, 9 - 17 years, M = 12.87, SD = 1.88). Following manual tracing of the anterior and posterior PG, structural equation modeling revealed that greater anterior, not posterior, PG volume mediated the association between greater DHEA levels and increasing dysregulation symptoms across time, controlling for baseline dysregulation symptom levels. These results suggest specificity in the role of the anterior PG in adrenarcheal processes that may confer risk for psychopathology during adolescence. This work not only highlights the importance of separately tracing the anterior and posterior PG, but also suggests that transdiagnostic factors like dysregulation are useful in parsing hormone-related increases in mental health symptoms in youth.