Luna Beatriz, Velanova Katerina, Geier Charles F
Laboratory of Neurocognitive Development, Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Brain Cogn. 2008 Dec;68(3):293-308. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2008.08.019. Epub 2008 Oct 19.
Cognitive control of behavior continues to improve through adolescence in parallel with important brain maturational processes including synaptic pruning and myelination, which allow for efficient neuronal computations and the functional integration of widely distributed circuitries supporting top-down control of behavior. This is also a time when psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and mood disorders, emerge reflecting a particularly vulnerability to impairments in development during adolescence. Oculomotor studies provide a unique neuroscientific approach to make precise associations between cognitive control and brain circuitry during development that can inform us of impaired systems in psychopathology. In this review, we first describe the development of pursuit, fixation, and visually-guided saccadic eye movements, which collectively indicate early maturation of basic sensorimotor processes supporting reflexive, exogenously-driven eye movements. We then describe the literature on the development of the cognitive control of eye movements as reflected in the ability to inhibit a prepotent eye movement in the antisaccade task, as well as making an eye movement guided by on-line spatial information in working memory in the oculomotor delayed response task. Results indicate that the ability to make eye movements in a voluntary fashion driven by endogenous plans shows a protracted development into adolescence. Characterizing the transition through adolescence to adult-level cognitive control of behavior can inform models aimed at understanding the neurodevelopmental basis of psychiatric disorders.
行为的认知控制在整个青春期持续改善，与此同时，重要的大脑成熟过程也在进行，包括突触修剪和髓鞘形成，这些过程有助于高效的神经元计算以及广泛分布的神经回路的功能整合，从而支持对行为的自上而下控制。这也是精神疾病（如精神分裂症和情绪障碍）出现的时期，反映出青少年在发育过程中特别容易受到损害。动眼研究提供了一种独特的神经科学方法，可在发育过程中精确关联认知控制和大脑回路，从而让我们了解精神病理学中受损的系统。在这篇综述中，我们首先描述追踪、注视和视觉引导的扫视眼动的发展，这些共同表明支持反射性、外源性驱动眼动的基本感觉运动过程的早期成熟。然后，我们描述关于眼动认知控制发展的文献，这体现在反扫视任务中抑制优势眼动的能力，以及在动眼延迟反应任务中根据工作记忆中的在线空间信息引导眼动的能力。结果表明，由内源性计划驱动以自愿方式进行眼动的能力在青春期会持续发展。描述从青春期到成人水平行为认知控制的转变，可以为旨在理解精神疾病神经发育基础的模型提供信息。
