If you have a child, a younger sibling, or even a friend with a kid, you’ll know just how quickly they seem to grow up.

One minute they’re a little newborn raisin, screaming, sleeping, pooping, and not much else; the next, they’re walking and talking, and asking question upon question upon question!

Child development experts began to decode the typical steps of development that children go through in their early years long ago, allowing parents and caregivers to understand if their child was ahead of the curve, or to seek help if they were developmentally delayed.

But new research recently published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour has cast new light on this topic, allowing us to understand the first six years of a child’s development in more detail than ever before.

The grand stride forward made by this study is because of the infinite detail in which we are nowadays able to study the human brain.

Throughout the duration of the project, the research team used MRI scans of the brains of over 500 children aged from birth to six years of age. Studying 1091 MRI scans, taken while the children were resting, the team were able to address a huge gap in our understanding of how a child’s brain develops, garnering valuable data to add to the field, as they explain in the report:

“Early childhood is crucial for brain functional development. Using advanced neuro imaging methods, characterizing functional connectivity has shed light on the developmental process in infants. However, insights into spatiotemporal functional maturation from birth to early childhood are substantially lacking.”

After observing how a child’s brain networks change as they develop, they mapped out the cognitive development of the children, allowing a ‘normal’ pattern of development – through key cognitive milestones – to become apparent.

These normative growth charts plotted the development of eight functional networks in the brain. Among these are visual and attention networks – things that we all adore seeing the development of in our children.

And plotting the normative curves of development in children is particularly helpful to helping us to identify when a child is falling outside of the average development for their age. These factors, when observed, can be very telling about other areas of the child’s development too:

“The importance of visual functions in cognitive development is well established. For example, measures of infant visual performance, such as attention and fixation, have been shown to predict neurocognitive development.”

Moreover, the researchers found that not only did developmental milestones in infancy suggest a child’s cognitive proficiency, they were also able to predict the occurrence of neurodevelopmental disorders related to some cognitive developmental delays:

“Network functions in early infancy are crucial for the development of cognition. Specifically, connections involving the primary, default, control and attention networks were key predictors.

Abnormalities associated with the task-positive networks and the default network… have been widely observed in neurodevelopmental disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism.”

While this is an area warranting further study, the development graphs will help parents, child development experts and specialists to further understand what is happening in a young child’s brain – and moreover, when it should happen, and why.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.