Charting functional brain development in adolescence with electrophysiology: Links with behavior and cortical structure

The thesis examines developmental changes in fundamental neural and cognitive processes underlying attention and cognitive control across adolescence. Using electroencephalography (EEG), the results generally indicate that development through adolescence is marked by a progressive weakening in brain activity related to early and basic processes of attention, while activity related to later and more controlled and strategic processes grow stronger with increasing age. The neural responses related to error-processing were found to have slightly different developmental trajectories to those associated with conflict processing. Further, we found that behavioral adaptations following conflict- and error processing grew more prominent through adolescence and were associated with stronger frontal neural activity. Combined, our results provide a comprehensive cross-sectional description of the maturation of central processes of attention and cognitive control, including electrophysiological markers and behavioral trial-wise adjustments, across adolescence