THE MEANDERING PATH OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

ChinmayaIAS Academy - Current Affairs March 20, 2023 GS2, Social sector Leave a comment 220 Views

The study is part of a long-term project called the ‘Consortium on Vulnerability to Externalising Disorders and Addictions’ (C-Veda).
It aims to follow up those tested over decades, and evaluate the effect of biological and environmental risk on cognitive development.
Brain development progresses from childhood to early adulthood with wide-ranging connections among neurons in multiple parts of the brain.
This connectivity significantly influences abilities such as temporarily holding chunks of information, called ‘working memory’ (for instance, memorising a phone number before writing it down) and ‘set shifting’ (iterating multiple ways to solve a puzzle).
These skills are classified as executive functions. Another category of functions, called social cognition help mediate relationships.
A consortium of psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists from India and the U.K., investigating the role of environment and genetics on brain development, analysed four kinds of executive functions:
verbal working memory, visuo-spatial working memory, response inhibition (the ability to stop one task and begin another), set-shifting and two kinds of social cognition: faux pas recognition (inferring social cues) and emotion recognition (inferring another’s state of mind).
They report, in the April 2023 edition of the peer-reviewedAsian Journal of Psychiatry, that ‘working memory’ develops first, followed by inhibitory control and finally cognitive flexibility.
However, certain abilities such as visual and verbal reasoning stabilised by late adolescence and didn’t rise as people aged, whereas cognitive ability and emotional cognition continued to develop even after adolescence, Eesha Sharma, the lead author of the study, told The Hindu.
The studies, spanning a range of socio-economic groups, ages, urbanisation and gender, also found that children who manifested certain traits to a high degree outperformed their peers in that skill even as they aged, while other traits didn’t constitute a permanent advantage.
“Response inhibition has a ceiling. If you are low performing early on, you will catch up as you grow older.
It was the other way, however, in verbal working memory. Those who did well in early childhood continued to significantly outperform their peers,”