Recently, Dr. Chen Lizhen and Professor Zuo Xinian from the Faculty of Psychology have published the research paper titled "Intellectual Ability and Cortical Homotopy Development in Children and Adolescents" in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.This study highlights the developmental trajectory of functional homotopy and its relationship with intelligence, offering novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive development.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

Functional homotopy, defined as the similarity between the corresponding regions of the two hemispheres, is a critical feature of interhemispheric communication and cognitive integration. Throughout development, the brain transitions from broadly connected networks in early childhood to more specialized configurations in adolescence, accompanied by increased hemispheric differentiation and integration. Using longitudinal data and a novel metric of functional homotopy, Homotopic Functional Affinity (HFA), we investigated the developmental patterns of functional homotopy and its relationship with intelligence. Our findings indicate a significant decrease in HFA with age, particularly in higher-order association networks. In addition, adolescents demonstrate stronger, predominantly negative correlations between HFA and intelligence, in contrast to younger children. In particular, individuals with superior intellectual ability experience accelerated decreases in HFA, indicating greater neural efficiency based on higher hemispheric specialization and differentiation. These findings provide evidence of the neural mechanisms that underlie cognitive development, emphasizing the dynamic interaction between hemispheric organization and intelligence. Our work may inform customized educational and clinical interventions for individual development.

Reference: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2025.101596