Brain-wide functional connectivity patterns support general cognitive ability and mediate effects of socioeconomic status in youth

• DOI: 10.1038/s41398-021-01704-0
• Publication Date: 2021-11-08T08:03:29Z
• Authors: Chandra Sripada; Mike Angstadt; Aman Taxali; D. Angus Clark; Tristan Greathouse; Saige Rutherford; Joseph R. Dickens; Kerby Shedden; Arianna M. Gard; Luke W. Hyde; Alexander Weigard; Mary Heitzeg
• Keywords: Adolescent; 05 social sciences; Brain; Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Article; 3. Good health; Cognition; Social Class; Connectome; Humans; 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences; RC321-571

AbstractGeneral 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 partialη2). 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.