Aggregation of Connectivity Gradient in Hippocampus Induced by Long-Term Cognitive Training with Development

Motivation: The hippocampus-cortical connections have shown rapid developmental-changed nature during childhood and learning-adapted plasticity with skill acquirement. Goal(s): However, little is known about the effect of development interacting with cognitive training on the hippocampal connectivity gradient during puberty. Approach: Here we employed longitudinal dataset (191 scans from training/control groups: n = 43/45) which collected neuroimaging data of school-age children across 0/3/5-year abacus mental calculation (AMC) training stages to explore this question. Results: By calculating connectivity gradient of hippocampus, we observed significantly development-induced gradient aggregation of hippocampus, and training promoted that effect, which were resulted from changes in functional connectivity between hippocampus with different cortices. Impact: These findings provide novel insights into development and training effects on function specialization of hippocampus during puberty from a largescale perspective of connectivity gradient, which may be helpful for better understanding of functionally atypical trait of hippocampal disorder for clinicians.