14th Annual Flux Congress — Day Three

The final day of the 14th Annual Flux Congress brought many of the ideas from the previous two days together.

Day One focused on how the developing brain learns what matters. Day Two asked how scientists translate that knowledge into clinical care, communities, and policy.

The final day asked perhaps the most consequential question:

What happens when our institutions take developmental science seriously?

Adriana Galván, PhD, opened with “Revisiting Arrested Development: From Neuroscience Evidence to Real-World Impact on Youth Justice.”

One idea stood out immediately:

Plasticity is a key ingredient for change, learning, and curiosity.

Adolescence is not simply a period of poor judgment waiting to resolve into adulthood. It is a period of substantial learning, adaptation, and neurobiological change. Systems involving dopamine continue developing throughout adolescence and contribute to motivation, reinforcement learning, exploration, and behavioral flexibility.

That matters when adolescent behavior intersects with the justice system.

If the brain systems supporting decision-making and behavioral regulation are still developing—and if young people retain substantial capacity for change—then developmental neuroscience has important implications for how responsibility, rehabilitation, and punishment are approached.

It also raises a difficult policy question: Where should the boundary of “youthful offender” end?

Kathy Do, PhD, brought that question into practice through the San Francisco Young Adult Court, a collaborative court designed specifically for young adults ages 18–24 facing felony charges.

Rather than treating the transition at age 18 as though development stops overnight, the program incorporates developmental science into its approach to accountability and rehabilitation.

The economic argument is difficult to ignore as well. Incarcerating young adults carries enormous financial costs, making the comparison between spending on incarceration and investing in developmentally informed intervention especially relevant.

But the deeper argument is not simply financial.

It is whether systems should be designed primarily around punishment for past behavior or around the possibility of future development.

The Southwestern College Youth Justice Program, represented by Raquel Funches, Dr. Carla Gomez, and Rey Ortega, continued that discussion by highlighting efforts to connect education, developmental understanding, and youth justice.

Taken together, the morning reinforced something developmental scientists have demonstrated repeatedly:

Young people are still becoming.

Our institutions have to decide whether that fact is merely acknowledged in academic papers or, ideally, reflected in policy.

The Science—and Scientists—Behind the Posters

Flux featured literally hundreds of poster presentations. It would be impossible to do justice to all of them, but a few were especially meaningful to me because I had the privilege of getting to know the scholars behind the work during my time at the conference.

Farnoosh Khandan, PhD, examined whether two physiological markers associated with executive functioning—midfrontal EEG theta activity and high-frequency heart-rate variability—were related during cognitive-control tasks in preschool children.

Interestingly, they were not.

Rather than making the research less useful, that null result tells us something important. Neural and autonomic systems involved in executive functioning may develop along somewhat different timelines in early childhood, and measuring rapidly developing young children introduces considerable variability.

It was also a good reminder that meaningful science does not require every hypothesis to be supported.

Kevin Petranu, MS, presented work examining the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) as a potential neural marker of PTSD risk following trauma in adolescents.

Greater functional connectivity between the BNST and several regions involved in reward, action, and motor processes was associated with greater PTSD symptoms shortly after trauma.

Research like this raises the possibility that neurobiological markers could someday help identify young people who may be particularly vulnerable following traumatic experiences—potentially allowing intervention to occur earlier rather than waiting for difficulties to become entrenched.

Landon Edwards, BS, presented work exploring something particularly interesting to me: a dyadic neurofeedback intervention involving adolescents and their parents.

The study examined whether parental cognitive ability influenced how adolescents responded to the intervention. Results suggested that it sometimes did, with parental cognitive ability moderating changes in adolescents' positive and negative emotions.

What I found compelling about this project was the larger premise.

Emotion regulation does not develop inside one isolated brain.

Parents and adolescents regulate, respond to, and learn from one another. Studying those processes as a dyad acknowledges something that developmental neuroscience increasingly seems to recognize: sometimes the appropriate unit of analysis is not simply the individual.

It is the relationship.

The final scientific sessions returned to the development of fluid cognition—the collection of abilities that allow us to flexibly solve problems and pursue goals.

These include working memory, episodic memory, processing speed, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.

Camille Phaneuf-Hadd, AM, examined how the architecture of these cognitive abilities changes across childhood and adolescence using measures from the NIH Toolbox.

Rather than viewing “executive functioning” as one monolithic ability, this work examines how different cognitive processes become increasingly organized and differentiated over development.

Jesse Niebaum, PhD, took the discussion in another direction by asking how willing children are to actually exert cognitive effort.

That distinction is important.

A child's performance on an executive-function task may not simply reflect what they can do. It can also reflect whether the task feels worthwhile, engaging, understandable, or worth the effort.

Change the context, and you may change the performance.

For anyone interested in assessment, that is a fairly significant complication.

Jessica Church, PhD, discussed the developing organization of functional brain networks and the emergence of brain “hubs” involved in cognitive control, default-mode processing, and other large-scale systems.

Finally, Yayao Zhao, MS, presented work examining how the organization of cortical thickness develops from infancy through late childhood and how those developmental patterns may contribute to executive functioning during adolescence.

By the time the closing ceremonies arrived, I found myself thinking deeply about my own research questions, professional trajectories, and fundamental reasons for wanting to take on a PhD program. I will take tomorrow, and potentially the entire weekend, to truly reflect on what I’ve learned over the last few days.