{"id":224866,"date":"2025-11-11T00:16:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T06:16:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/white-matter-connections-may-drive-adolescent-cognitive-gains-study-suggests"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:16:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T06:16:35","slug":"white-matter-connections-may-drive-adolescent-cognitive-gains-study-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/white-matter-connections-may-drive-adolescent-cognitive-gains-study-suggests","title":{"rendered":"White matter connections may drive adolescent cognitive gains, study suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/white-matter-connections-may-drive-adolescent-cognitive-gains-study-suggests2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Adolescence, the life stage that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood, is known to be a vital period for the brain\u2019s development. During this critical phase, people\u2019s mental abilities, including their problem-solving and memory skills, rapidly improve.<\/p>\n<p>Past neuroscience studies have tried to link these observed cognitive improvements during adolescence to changes in the structure of the brain and the connections between different brain regions. Nonetheless, the relationship between changes in the brain and specific aspects of cognitive performance has not been fully elucidated.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Vanderbilt University, CNRS Universit\u00e9 de Lyon, and Wake Forest School of Medicine recently carried out a study involving monkeys that was aimed at shedding new light into the underpinnings of mental maturation during adolescence. Their findings, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41593-025-02076-0\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Neuroscience<\/i>, suggest that the cognitive development of adolescent monkeys is associated with a refined connectivity between brain regions, while changes in gray matter structure play a lesser role.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adolescence, the life stage that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood, is known to be a vital period for the brain\u2019s development. During this critical phase, people\u2019s mental abilities, including their problem-solving and memory skills, rapidly improve. Past neuroscience studies have tried to link these observed cognitive improvements during adolescence to changes in the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}