Global associations between regional gray matter volume and diverse complex cognitive functions: evidence from a large sample study

Hikaru Takeuchi,Yuki Yamamoto,Atsushi Sekiguchi,Kohei Sakaki,Rui Nouchi,Tsuyoshi Araki,Magistro Daniele,Kunio Iizuka,Yasuyuki Taki,Ryoichi Yokoyama,Susumu Yokota,Shigeyuki Ikeda,Seishu Nakagawa,Carlos Makoto Miyauchi,Takamitsu Shinada,Sugiko Hanawa,Yuko Sassa,Takayuki Nozawa,Yuka Kotozaki,Ryuta Kawashima

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-10104-8

Abstract

Correlations between regional gray matter volume (rGMV) and psychometric test scores have been measured to investigate the neural bases for individual differences in complex cognitive abilities (CCAs). However, such studies have yielded different rGMV correlates of the same CCA. Based on the available evidence, we hypothesized that diverse CCAs are all positively but only weakly associated with rGMV in widespread brain areas. To test this hypothesis, we used the data from a large sample of healthy young adults [776 males and 560 females; mean age: 20.8 years, standard deviation (SD) = 0.8] and investigated associations between rGMV and scores on multiple CCA tasks (including non-verbal reasoning, verbal working memory, Stroop interference, and complex processing speed tasks involving spatial cognition and reasoning). Better performance scores on all tasks except non-verbal reasoning were associated with greater rGMV across widespread brain areas. The effect sizes of individual associations were generally low, consistent with our previous studies. The lack of strong correlations between rGMV and specific CCAs, combined with stringent corrections for multiple comparisons, may lead to different and diverse findings in the field.

Highlights

Correlations between regional gray matter volume and psychometric test scores have been measured to investigate the neural bases for individual differences in complex cognitive abilities (CCAs)
Complex cognitive abilities (CCAs) include non-verbal reasoning[3], which is well correlated with general intelligence (g factor), which in turn is predictive of performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks[4], capacity of working memory which is the limited capacity storage system involved in the maintenance and manipulation of information over short periods of time[5], and executive functions, which refer to cognitive processes involved in the intentional component of environmental interaction, including planning and inhibitory control[6]
All task performances were significantly correlated with one another

Summary

Introduction

Correlations between regional gray matter volume (rGMV) and psychometric test scores have been measured to investigate the neural bases for individual differences in complex cognitive abilities (CCAs). A meta-analysis[10] found significant correlations between psychometric intelligence and gray matter structure in several areas, these findings did not cover the entire brain and may be partly incongruent with previous studies. In addition to low effect size and statistical power, it is possible that the multiple areas showing significant associations with CCA in different studies are functionally associated with diverse CCAs. A series of recent studies using huge sample sizes (N > several hundred) of young adults showed that associations between individual aspects of cognition and regional gray matter structure were generally low[16]. The present study utilized rigorous permutation-based statistical methods using threshold-free cluster enhancement[23]

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