Application of MEG in Understanding the Development of Executive and Social Cognitive Functions

Human social and executive functions are complex and known to follow aprolonged developmental course from childhood through to early adulthood.These processes rely on the integrity and maturity of distributed neural regions,which also show protracted maturation. MEG is the ideal modality to determinethe development of these intricate and multifaceted cognitive abilities; itsexquisite temporal and spatial resolution allows investigators to track the agerelatedchanges in both neural timing and location. The challenge for MEG hasbeen twofold: to develop appropriate tasks to capture the neurodevelopmentaltrajectory of these functions and to develop appropriate analysis strategiesthat can capture the subtle, often rapid, cognitive processes, involving frontallobe activity. In this chapter, we review MEG research on executive, social,and cognitive functions in typically developing children and clinical groups.The studies include the examination of working memory, mental flexibility,facial emotional processing and inhibition, and theory of mind. We end with adiscussion on the challenges of testing young children in the MEG environmentand the development of age-appropriate technologies and paradigms.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe