Bunge, Silvia A.

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Silvia A. Bunge

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HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
The developing human brain: a frontiers research topic
Silvia A. Bunge*
Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
*Correspondence: sbunge@berkeley.edu
IntroductIon
The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience (DCN) exam-
ines how the human brain and behavior change over the lifes-
pan, in particular over infancy, childhood, and adolescence. DCN 
researchers conduct basic research on typical brain development, 
and/or research on pediatric populations with neurodevelopmental 
disorders.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience is not child’s play – it is a 
complex and challenging, but exciting, area of research. It is highly 
multidisciplinary, in that it builds on the fields of developmental, 
cognitive, affective/social, and clinical psychology and neurosci-
ence. DCN research also relies on advances in computer science, 
physics, and mathematics. Increasingly, as we learn more about the 
developing human brain, findings from DCN have strong implica-
tions for medicine, education, law, public health, and social welfare.
The story of this compendium begins with a highly successful 
conference on neurocognitive development held at UC Berkeley in 
2009 – a 3-day event with over 200 attendees and over 60 scientific 
presentations from around the United States and Europe. I thank 
Brian Meyer, a graduate student in Psychology at UC Berkeley, for 
helping me to organize this conference. Following on the heels 
of this conference, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Elizabeth O’Hare and 
I solicited submissions to a special issue of Frontiers in Human 
Neuroscience focused on the developing human brain. Dr. O’Hare 
deserves my gratitude for helping to handle the peer review of 
these submissions.
This Research Topic includes a selection of empirical and review 
papers from top DCN researchers, organized into six interrelated 
sections.
Section I examines how our visual and auditory systems develop 
to support the perception of complex stimuli. Recent DCN research 
highlights the point that, contrary to common belief, perceptual 
development is not complete after the first few years of life.
Face processing – both the recognition of individuals and of spe-
cific emotions – is a particularly challenging problem for the visual 
system, and continues to improve through adolescence. Section 
II extends the theme of Section I by exploring in more detail the 
perception of faces, which is critical for social functioning. This 
section ends with the exploration of deficits in social functioning 
after pediatric brain injury, which serves as a bridge from studies 
of perception to studies of action.
Section III examines two key neural changes that underlie shifts 
in behavior over development. The first is a change in the process-
ing of rewards and feedback, which are powerful motivators of 
behavior. The second is a change in the ability to control behavioral 
responses, known as cognitive control or executive function, or 
more generally as self-regulation.
Developmental cognitive neuroscience researchers have begun 
to use sophisticated network analysis tools to examine developmen-
tal changes in the strength of interactions between brain regions in 
large-scale networks. Section IV explores how these brain networks 
are influenced by common genetic variation or by the presence of 
a disorder with a strong hereditary component.
Section V features a relatively new area of research within DCN: 
the exploration of societal influences on brain development. Two 
of the papers in this section compare neurocognitive function in 
children from North American and Chinese families. The other two 
papers review what is known currently about the influences of child-
hood adversity and socioeconomic status on brain development.
Finally, Section VI showcases several new ways of thinking about, 
and studying, the developing human brain. The first paper is an opin-
ion piece highlighting the relevance to DCN of research at the level of 
neural circuits. The second paper shows how we can go beyond con-
ventional fMRI imaging analyses to examine changes in brain function 
at a finer grain using multivariate pattern classification algorithms.
In conclusion, this compendium shows us both where the field 
of DCN is currently, and where it is headed. The advances over the 
last few years have been breathtaking – and the best is yet to come.
Received: 23 February 2012; accepted: 23 February 2012; published online: 12 March 
2012.
Citation: Bunge SA (2012) The developing human brain: a frontiers research topic. Front. 
Hum. Neurosci. 6:47. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00047
Copyright © 2012 Bunge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the 
Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial 
use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and 
source are credited.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org March 2012 | Volume 6 | Article 47 | 1
Editorial
published: 12 March 2012
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00047


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