The human brain undergoes a prolonged period of cortical development that spans multiple decades. During childhood and adolescence, cortical development progresses from lower-order, primary and unimodal cortices with sensory and motor functions to higher-order, transmodal association cortices subserving executive, socioemotional, and mentalizing functions. The spatiotemporal patterning of cortical maturation thus proceeds in a hierarchical manner, conforming to an evolutionarily rooted, sensorimotor-to-association axis of cortical organization. This developmental program has been characterized by data derived from multimodal human neuroimaging and is linked to the hierarchical unfolding of plasticity-related neurobiological events. Critically, this developmental program serves to enhance feature variation between lower-order and higher-order regions, thus endowing the brain’s association cortices with unique functional properties. However, accumulating evidence suggests that protracted plasticity within late-maturing association cortices, which represents a defining feature of the human developmental program, also confers risk for diverse developmental psychopathologies.

人类大脑经历了长达数十年的皮质发育期。在儿童期和青春期，皮质发育从具有感觉和运动功能的低阶、初级和单模态皮质发展到支持执行、社会情感和心智化功能的高阶、跨模态联合皮质。因此，皮质成熟的时空模式以分层方式进行，符合皮质组织的进化根源、感觉运动到关联轴。该发育程序的特点是来自多模式人类神经影像的数据，并与可塑性相关神经生物学事件的分层展开相关。至关重要的是，这种发育程序有助于增强低阶区域和高阶区域之间的特征差异，从而赋予大脑的关联皮层独特的功能特性。然而，越来越多的证据表明，晚熟关联皮质内的长期可塑性代表了人类发展计划的一个决定性特征，也带来了多种发展性精神病理学的风险。