Interplay of socioeconomic status, cognition, and school performance in the ABCD sample.

Coming from a disadvantaged background can have negative impact on an individual's educational trajectory. Some people however seem unaffected and cope well with the demands and challenges posed by school education, despite growing up in adverse conditions, a phenomenon termed academic resilience. While it is uncertain which underlying factors make some people more likely to circumvent unfavorable odds than others, both socioeconomic status (SES) and cognitive ability have robustly been linked to school performance. The objective of the present work is to investigate if individual cognitive abilities and SES interact in their effect on grades. For this purpose, we analyzed SES, cognitive, and school performance data from 5001 participants from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Ordinal logistic regression models suggest similar patterns of associations between three SES measures (parental education, income-to-needs ratio, and neighborhood deprivation) and grades at two timepoints, with no evidence for interaction effects between SES and time. Parental education and income-to-needs ratio were associated with grades at both timepoints, irrespective of whether cognitive abilities were modeled or not. Neighborhood deprivation, in contrast, was only a statistically significant predictor of reported grades when cognitive abilities were not factored in. Cognitive abilities interacted with parental education level, meaning that they could be a safeguard against effects of SES on school performance.

Beyond the language network: Associations between reading, receptive vocabulary, and grey matter volume in 10-year-olds.

Most research on the neurostructural basis of language abilities in children stems from small samples and surface-based measures. To complement and expand the existent knowledge, we investigated associations between grey matter volume and language performance in a large sample of 9-to-11-year-old children, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (N = 1865) and an alternative measure of grey matter morphology. We estimated whole-brain grey matter volume for one half of the sample (N = 939) and tested for correlations with scores on a picture vocabulary and a letter and word reading test, with and without factoring in general intelligence and total grey matter volume as additional covariates. The initial analyses yielded correlations between grey matter in the right occipital fusiform gyrus, the right lingual gyrus, and the cerebellum for both vocabulary and reading. Employing the significant clusters from the first analyses as regions of interest in the second half of the cohort (N = 926) in correlational and multiple regression analyses suggests the cluster in the right occipital fusiform and lingual gyri to be most robust. Overall, the amount of variance explained by grey matter volume is limited and factoring in additional covariates paints an inconsistent picture. The present findings reinforce existent doubt with respect to explaining individual differences in reading and vocabulary performance based on unique contributions of macrostructural brain features.

T1w/T2w Ratio and Cognition in 9-to-11-Year-Old Children.

Childhood is a period of extensive cortical and neural development. Among other things, axons in the brain gradually become more myelinated, promoting the propagation of electrical signals between different parts of the brain, which in turn may facilitate skill development. Myelin is difficult to assess in vivo, and measurement techniques are only just beginning to make their way into standard imaging protocols in human cognitive neuroscience. An approach that has been proposed as an indirect measure of cortical myelin is the T1w/T2w ratio, a contrast that is based on the intensities of two standard structural magnetic resonance images. Although not initially intended as such, researchers have recently started to use the T1w/T2w contrast for between-subject comparisons of cortical data with various behavioral and cognitive indices. As a complement to these earlier findings, we computed individual cortical T1w/T2w maps using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (N = 960; 449 females; aged 8.9 to 11.0 years) and related the T1w/T2w maps to indices of cognitive ability; in contrast to previous work, we did not find significant relationships between T1w/T2w values and cognitive performance after correcting for multiple testing. These findings reinforce existent skepticism about the applicability of T1w/T2w ratio for inter-individual comparisons.