Timing and plasticity are critical to progress in research on stress and neurodevelopment

@ariellekeller.bsky.social
@jamapediatrics.com
@utdallas.bsky.social
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

I’m hiring!! 🎉 Looking for a full-time Lab Manager to help launch the Minds, Experiences, and Language Lab at Stanford. We’ll use all-day language recording, eye tracking, & neuroimaging to study how kids & families navigate unequal structural constraints. Please share:
phxc1b.rfer.us/STANFORDWcqUYo

Finally, thank you to the participants and their families that made this work possible! 🧠

This work was a major undertaking and wouldn't have come to fruition without support from several incredible scientists incl. W Foran, @finncalabro.bsky.social, @valeriejsydnor.bsky.social, D Petrie, A Parr, A Famalette, N Phang, A Sista, S Sorrells, and B Luna et al. at the @lncdpitt.bsky.social

Together, this work helps us understand how the human amygdala functionally develops to support affective + cognitive control. Future work is needed to extend these findings into clinical populations + identify developmental periods during which interventions may be most efficacious. 18/18

When plotting psychological term correlations by age, we noticed developmental divergences, such that earlier in development, terms were similarly associated across amygdala nuclei. Later, however, they increasingly diverged, suggesting potential functional specialization through development. 17/18

As one may expect, the terms w/ the strongest correlations across all nuclei were 'fear,' 'emotion,' and 'anxiety.' Interestingly, 'salience' and 'valence' were most related to the BLA, while 'reinforcement learning' and 'reward anticipation' were most strongly linked to the central amygdala. 16/18

We also used a meta-analytic technique (via Neurosynth) to decode cortical connectivity patterns in our data to identify the psychological processes previous neuroimaging studies had associated with structures we found to be most strongly connected to our amygdala nuclei. 15/18

Beyond age effects, stronger connectivity between the corticioamygdaloid transition area and ACC was primarily related to more socioemotional dysregulation and worse cognitive performance. 14/18

Finally, the superficial amygdala has been linked to olfaction (e.g., chemoreception) and social processes, like mating + aggression. We found connectivity b/w the superficial amygdala (i.e., corticoamygdaloid transition area) + anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to be particularly protracted. 13/18

We expected central amygdala connectivity to peak in late adolescence, given that's when risk-taking often peaks. Central amygdala coupling w/ ventral portions of the PFC peaked in late adolescence, and stronger connectivity was related to faster behavioral performance and less internalizing. 12/18

The central amygdala, characterized by GABAergic medium spiny neurons and projections to the brainstem and hypothalamus, has been thought to resemble the striatum. It has also been implicated in motivated (e.g., approach, avoidance) behaviors and impaired in eating and substance use disorders. 11/18

We found evidence for age-related increases in BLA - lateral PFC coupling, as well as for associations between connectivity strength and fewer emotion regulation difficulties and better cognitive control performance. 10/18

We expected the basolateral amygdala (BLA), predominantly comprised of excitatory pyramidal neurons that resemble the cortex and expanded in primates, to couple across development with the lateral PFC, important for cognitive control and emotion regulation. 9/18

Following Bonferroni corrections, only a handful of fronto-amygdala connections significantly changed with age. Of these age-related connections, we also sought to characterize their associations with self-reported measures of affective control and task-based measures of cognitive control. 8/18

We leveraged nearly 30 minutes of high-quality 7T fMRI data per person at each visit, combining resting-state and (task-regressed) background connectivity data, to estimate how functional connectivity between amygdala nuclei and PFC structures changed across development and related to behavior. 7/18

We then used these amygdala nuclei segmentations as the regions-of-interest (ROIs) for our functional connectivity analyses. Although FreeSurfer could segment 9 amygdala nuclei per hemisphere, we were still only able to use 5 nuclei due to size and signal concerns. 6/18

We first ran participants' high-quality anatomical scans through FreeSurfer to segment each person's amygdala nuclei in their own space to capture individual differences in structural morphology. Two excellent undergrad RAs (bsky-less Natalie + Arshia) arduously helped QC these reconstructions. 5/18

Here, we leveraged longitudinal neuroimaging data at 7 Tesla to characterize how amygdala nuclei mature in their functional connectivity with the PFC to understand their contributions to affective and cognitive control in a large population of healthy participants ages 10-32. 4/18

When examining how functional interactions b/w the PFC and amygdala develop, findings are inconclusive and even contradictory. This may be due to (1) functional heterogeneity w/in the amygdala; (2) anatomical heterogeneity b/w participants; and (3) technical challenges when imaging at 3 Tesla. 3/18

Decades of clinical findings implicate the amygdala across neuropsychiatric disorders, most with adolescent onsets. Separate findings show that structural connections (e.g., white matter tracts) between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and amygdala are some of the last to finish maturing. 2/18

How does human amygdala circuitry develop through adolescence to support affective and cognitive control processes? Excited to share recent work from my dissertation, now out in Cell Reports, that uses longitudinal, multimodal neuroimaging at 7 Tesla to answer this question! A 🧵 tinyurl.com/5aaf9fpv

Absolutely thrilled to share the 🌟 FIRST PAPER 🌟 from ACORN Lab! 🐿️ I’m beyond proud of all-star grad student @heatherarobinson.bsky.social for this review of “exposome” effects on neurodevelopment & cognition! Paper here rdcu.be/ezUqx & thread below 👇 /1

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #devsky #cogdev

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...