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Theories of human neurobehavioral development suggest executive functions mature from childhood through adolescence, a time when individuals may also experience peaks in risk-taking behaviors such as substance use, and increased vulnerability to psychiatric disorders. However, the timing of adolescent executive function development and the specific age when executive functions reach adult levels have been challenging to define. 

Investigators including Brenden Tervo-Clemmens, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, University of Minnesota); Finnegan Calabro, PhD (Research Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Bioengineering); Ashley Parr, PhD (Research Instructor in Psychiatry); and Beatriz Luna, PhD (Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology and Bioengineering and Staunton Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry), conducted a systematic investigation of the relative rate and timing of executive function maturation. 

Access to four large-scale, independent datasets enabled the team to define the boundaries of adolescent executive function development for the first time. The investigators aggregated data from more than 10,000 participants (ages 8-35 years old) to construct a comprehensive set of executive function data spanning the entire adolescent period, as well as the relative transitional periods of late childhood and early adulthood. 

Analysis of these data, recently published in Nature Communications, demonstrated that executive functions continue to develop into late adolescence (ages 18-20 years old), following a rapid burst of executive function development in late childhood to mid-adolescence (10-15 years old), followed by continued but decelerated improvement mid-adolescence (15-17 years old), stabilizing in adulthood (18-20 years of age). 

“The development of executive function has been misunderstood to increase linearly without a clear age of maturation given the different assessments that are used in the literature. Leveraging big data, including longitudinal assessments using a large number of different executive function assessments, we were able to more conclusively show the curvilinear shape of executive function development—a trajectory that parallels the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which supports executive function—and importantly, identify when adult maturation stabilizes,” said Dr. Luna, the paper’s senior author. “These findings have important implications for a range of areas from juvenile justice, parenting, and education to medical care, and importantly, to many mental illnesses that emerge during the transition from adolescence to adulthood.”

A canonical trajectory of executive function maturation from adolescence to adulthood
Tervo-Clemmens B, Calabro FJ, Parr AC, Fedor J, Foran W, Luna B. 
Nature Communications 14, 6922 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42540-8