Psychedelics Across the Lifespan: Developmental Timing, Systems-Level Mechanisms, and Translational Biomarkers

Brain development is a lifelong, dynamic process: from prenatal and early postnatal circuit formation, through childhood and the profound remodeling of adolescence, into adulthood and aging. Each stage is defined by distinct neuromodulatory tone, receptor trajectories, and large-scale network dynamics, and each opens characteristic windows of heightened plasticity, vulnerability, and resilience. Many neuropsychiatric disorders track these developmental transitions in their onset, course, and treatment response.

Historically, the study of psychedelic compounds has concentrated on healthy adults, leaving other developmental stages — including childhood, adolescence, pregnancy, and aging — comparatively underexplored in both clinical and preclinical work. Here, we aim to bring together a body of work that characterizes the effects of psychedelic compounds across development, uses these compounds to probe developmental processes, and investigates their potential therapeutic uses in age-specific patient populations. We are interested in papers addressing any compounds that fall within the broad category of psychedelics, including "classic" serotonergic psychedelics, empathogens/entactogens, dissociatives, deliriants, and neuroplastogens.

The main topics we aim to cover in this collection include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Psychedelics in adolescence: adolescence involves a period of rapid circuit refinement and heightened plasticity, with elevated vulnerability to environmental insults and neuropsychiatric disorder onset - a key, still underrepresented window for psychedelic research.
• Sensitive periods and neuromodulation across the lifespan: maturation and aging of neurotransmitter and neuromodulator systems, trajectories of receptor expression and function, and their interaction with psychedelic mechanisms.
• Circuit maturation and remodeling under psychedelic-relevant perturbations: prefrontal-limbic regulation, thalamocortical interactions, hippocampal development, and cortico-striatal loops across developmental stages.
• Systems-level biomarkers across development: EEG/MEG/LFP oscillations, fMRI connectivity, pupillometry, autonomic markers, computational phenotyping, and trajectory prediction.
• Behavioral and cognitive domains with developmental framing: affect regulation, stress responsivity, learning and flexibility, social processing, sensory integration, and longitudinal designs.
• Heterogeneity and moderators: age, sex differences, stress/adversity, genetic risk, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative conditions, sleep/circadian factors, and environmental context.

We welcome contributions that quantify age-dependent effects, distinguish windows of vulnerability or resilience, and test longer-term developmental consequences at the level of circuits, networks, molecular biology, and behavior. We invite work addressing both acute and longitudinal effects, with mechanistic and quantitative systems neuroscience approaches (e.g., electrophysiology, neuroimaging/connectomics, computational modeling, longitudinal designs, and harmonized cross-species tasks/metrics). We also welcome review papers that offer concise synthesis and novel interpretation of the existing literature, generating informed conclusions and future directions for the field.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Clinical Trial
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: psychedelic, Adolescence, Thalamocortical networks, EEG, MEG

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.