Synaptic pruning, myelination and the emergence of psychiatric disorders in late adolescence

Adolescence is an important developmental period during which there are diverse changes in the brain and behavior. Goal-directed behaviors and the component processes underlying those behaviors improve during adolescence, including working memory, response inhibition, and reinforcement learning. At the same time there is substantial pruning of excitatory connections in prefrontal cortex and ongoing myelination of axons. However, psychiatric disorders also become increasingly prevalent in late adolescence and early adulthood. In this study, we develop computational models that suggest a hypothesis for how the ongoing changes in the brain can give rise to the increased prevalence of psychiatric disorders. We show that both myelination and pruning during adolescence lead to attractor landscapes in which strongly encoded memories, driven by three-factor learning rules that modulate Hebbian plasticity, come to dominate the landscape of brain activity, at the expense of weakly encoded memories. Pruning and myelination lead to large, strong attractors which, if they are related to aversive emotions, can drive intrusive thoughts and compulsions in obsessive compulsive disorder, rumination in depression, and aversive memories in post-traumatic stress disorder. The link between pruning, myelination and the emergence of dominant attractors for emotionally salient memories is well supported by the models. The way these effects map onto forebrain circuits requires more work.