Abstract
General cognitive ability (GCA) is an individual difference dimension linked to important academic, occupational, and health-related outcomes and its development is strongly linked to differences in socioeconomic status (SES). Complex abilities of the human brain are realized through interconnections among distributed brain regions, but brain-wide connectivity patterns associated with GCA in youth, and the influence of SES on these connectivity patterns, are poorly understood. The present study examined functional connectomes from 5937 9- and 10-year-olds in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) multi-site study. Using multivariate predictive modeling methods, we identified whole-brain functional connectivity patterns linked to GCA. In leave-one-site-out cross-validation, we found these connectivity patterns exhibited strong and statistically reliable generalization at 19 out of 19 held-out sites accounting for 18.0% of the variance in GCA scores (cross-validated partial η2). GCA-related connections were remarkably dispersed across brain networks: across 120 sets of connections linking pairs of large-scale networks, significantly elevated GCA-related connectivity was found in 110 of them, and differences in levels of GCA-related connectivity across brain networks were notably modest. Consistent with prior work, socioeconomic status was a strong predictor of GCA in this sample, and we found that distributed GCA-related brain connectivity patterns significantly statistically mediated this relationship (mean proportion mediated: 15.6%, p < 2 × 10−16). These results demonstrate that socioeconomic status and GCA are related to broad and diffuse differences in functional connectivity architecture during early adolescence, potentially suggesting a mechanism through which socioeconomic status influences cognitive development.
Highlights
In addition to specific abilities that contribute to the performance of individual cognitive tasks, there is considerable evidence for a general cognitive ability (GCA) [1, 2] that contributes to performance across a diverse range of cognitive tasks [3,4,5,6,7]
We found that the correlation between actual versus predicted GCA scores, averaging across the 19 folds of the cross-validation, was 0.42 (Fig. 2, left panel)
This map identified GCA-related connections throughout the brain, and we further examine the spatial distribution of GCA-related connectivity below
Summary
In addition to specific abilities that contribute to the performance of individual cognitive tasks, there is considerable evidence for a general cognitive ability (GCA) [1, 2] that contributes to performance across a diverse range of cognitive tasks [3,4,5,6,7]. The human brain is organized as a complex network [13, 14], with interconnections among regions implicated in diverse cognitive functions [15]. Network neuroscience [16] is beginning to shed light on how the brain’s connectivity architecture contributes to individual differences in GCA, especially using newer multivariate data-driven approaches [17, 18], but most existing studies of GCA have been in adult samples [19, 20]. Brain networks exhibit substantial maturation [21] and cognitive abilities rapidly improve [22]
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