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The brain's functional architecture and organization undergo continual development and modification throughout adolescence. While it is well known that multiple factors govern brain maturation, the constantly evolving patterns of time‐resolved functional connectivity are still unclear and understudied. We systematically evaluated over 47,000 youth and adult brains to bridge this gap, highlighting replicable time‐resolved developmental and aging functional brain patterns. The largest difference between the two life stages was captured in a brain state that indicated coherent strengthening and modularization of functional coupling within the auditory, visual, and motor subdomains, supplemented by anticorrelation with other subdomains in adults. This distinctive pattern, which we replicated in independent data, was consistently less modular or absent in children and presented a negative association with age in adults, thus indicating an overall inverted U‐shaped trajectory. This indicates greater synchrony, strengthening, modularization, and integration of the brain's functional connections beyond adolescence, and gradual decline of this pattern during the healthy aging process. We also found evidence that the developmental changes may also bring along a departure from the canonical static functional connectivity pattern in favor of more efficient and modularized utilization of the vast brain interconnections. State‐based statistical summary measures presented robust and significant group differences that also showed significant age‐related associations. The findings reported in this article support the idea of gradual developmental and aging brain state adaptation processes in different phases of life and warrant future research via lifespan studies to further authenticate the projected time‐resolved brain state trajectories.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have shown altered brain dynamic functional connectivity (DFC) in mental disorders. Here, we aim to explore DFC across a spectrum of symptomatically‐related disorders including bipolar disorder with psychosis (BPP), schizoaffective disorder (SAD), and schizophrenia (SZ). We introduce a group information guided independent component analysis procedure to estimate both group‐level and subject‐specific connectivity states from DFC. Using resting‐state fMRI data of 238 healthy controls (HCs), 140 BPP, 132 SAD, and 113 SZ patients, we identified measures differentiating groups from the whole‐brain DFC and traditional static functional connectivity (SFC), separately. Results show that DFC provided more informative measures than SFC. Diagnosis‐related connectivity states were evident using DFC analysis. For the dominant state consistent across groups, we found 22 instances of hypoconnectivity (with decreasing trends from HC to BPP to SAD to SZ) mainly involving post‐central, frontal, and cerebellar cortices as well as 34 examples of hyperconnectivity (with increasing trends HC through SZ) primarily involving thalamus and temporal cortices. Hypoconnectivities/hyperconnectivities also showed negative/positive correlations, respectively, with clinical symptom scores. Specifically, hypoconnectivities linking postcentral and frontal gyri were significantly negatively correlated with the PANSS positive/negative scores. For frontal connectivities, BPP resembled HC while SAD and SZ were more similar. Three connectivities involving the left cerebellar crus differentiated SZ from other groups and one connection linking frontal and fusiform cortices showed a SAD‐unique change. In summary, our method is promising for assessing DFC and may yield imaging biomarkers for quantifying the dimension of psychosis.Hum Brain Mapp 38:2683–2708, 2017. ©2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.