It is showed that the PFC is one of the last regions of the brain to mature, based on most indicators of development, and that the neurons in these areas have more complex dendritic trees than primary somatosensory and primary motor cortex those that mature earlier. The development of the brain occurs through the interaction of several processes, some of these stages are completed before birth such as neurulation, cell proliferation, and migration, although others continue into adulthood. Therefore, the functions of PFC are certainly a crucial aspect of what we think of as “human” in cognition. PFC plays most important roles in executive functions, which includes the organization of several sensory inputs, the maintenance of attention, planning, reasoning, language comprehension, the working memory, and the coordination of goal-directed behaviors. A number of recent studies have examined the relative size of gray and white matter in the frontal lobe or PFC, while others have examined the volume, neuron density, and columnar organization of functional subregions within the PFC. The frontal lobe includes several anatomical components and different functional areas, and, so it is thought that as a discrete unit can only tell us so much. In the past two decades, an increasing number of studies have examined the human frontal lobe and PFC utilizing a wide variety of methodologies including stereology, MRI, minicolumn analysis, and DTI. The organization of prefrontal cortical circuitry may have been critical to the occurrence of human-specific executive and social-emotional functions, and developmental pathology in these same systems underlies many psychiatric disorders therefore, if we understand these developmental process well, we could better analyze the development of psychiatric disorders. With these neuroanatomical changes, neural networks construct appropriate for complex cognitive processing. The prefrontal cortex undergoes maturation during childhood with a reduction of synaptic and neuronal density, a growth of dendrites, and an increase in white matter volume. To better understand this issue, we focus the literature on the development of the prefrontal cortex during early childhood, the changes in structural architecture, neural activity, and cognitive abilities. The prefrontal cortex plays an essential role in various cognitive functions and little is known about how such neural mechanisms develop during childhood yet. This chapter outlines the issues associated with the development of prefrontal cortex in children and adolescents, and describes the developmental profile of executive processes across childhood.
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