In our sample of children, whole-brain cortical

thickness analysis revealed marked and multilobar age-related thinning, encompassing large clusters in bilateral prefrontal, ABT-737 cost cingulate, supramarginal, paracentral, and medial occipital regions. Findings were consistent across several surface based smoothing kernels chosen, indicating high degrees of robustness of effects across different spatial scales. Even though cortical thickness in our circumscribed ROIs of lDLPFC and rDLPFC, did not show such marked age effects when testing only within the narrow age range of the child sample, the inclusion of the adult sample into the analysis indeed revealed age-related thinning in our ROIs over lDLPFC and rDLPFC replicating previous results which were usually PI3K inhibitor based on samples covering a large and arguably more densely sampled age-range (Gogtay et al., 2004, Shaw et al., 2008, Sowell et al., 2003 and Sowell et al., 2004). Our relatively narrow age-range as well as comparably small sample of children are likely also among the reasons why age-related cortical thinning in our ROIs was not associated with strategic behavior. In addition, collecting a greater range of structural parameters, providing for instance indicators for the development of white matter,

might help to find a structural brain basis for the age-related changes observed in strategic behavior. We performed a separate regression analyses focusing on the relationship between cortical thickness of lDLPFC and rDLPFC and strategic behavior independent of age. After statistically Tolmetin controlling for age effects prior to analysis, we observed positive correlations between cortical thickness of lDLPFC, but again not rDLPFC, with both strategic behavior and impulse control in the sample of children. Importantly, the association of increased age-corrected cortical thickness of lDLPFC and greater strategic behavior was replicated in the sample of adults, providing a striking convergence of brain-behavior correlations. These results may reflect

cortical plasticity dependent on individual differences in the daily practice of behavioral control functions, which are required for social strategic behavior. Similarly, previous studies demonstrated an association between the degree of changes in brain structure and the acquisition of specific skills, as shown in the domains of motor training (Draganski et al., 2004), spatial navigation (Maguire et al., 2000), language acquisition (Mechelli et al., 2004), and memory capacity (Engvig et al., 2010). The present findings extend previous data in the domain of social decision making and constitute a crucial role for individual differences in cortical thickness in explaining variations observed in the extent of strategic behavior in children as well as in adults.