Differences in educational opportunity predict white matter development.

Coarse measures of socioeconomic status, such as parental income or parental education, have been linked to differences in white matter development. However, these measures do not provide insight into specific aspects of an individual's environment and how they relate to brain development. On the other hand, educational intervention studies have shown that changes in an individual's educational context can drive measurable changes in their white matter.

White matter and literacy: A dynamic system in flux.

Cross-sectional studies have linked differences in white matter tissue properties to reading skills. However, past studies have reported a range of, sometimes conflicting, results. Some studies suggest that white matter properties act as individual-level traits predictive of reading skill, whereas others suggest that reading skill and white matter develop as a function of an individual's educational experience.

Interventions to improve equational reasoning: replication and extension of the Cuisenaire-Gattegno curriculum effect.

Introduction: The ability to reason about equations in a robust and fluent way requires both instrumental knowledge of symbolic forms, syntax, and operations, as well as relational knowledge of how such formalisms map to meaningful relationships captured within mental models. A recent systematic review of studies contrasting the Cuisenaire-Gattegno (Cui) curriculum approach vs. traditional rote schooling on equational reasoning has demonstrated the positive efficacy of pedagogies that focus on integrating these two forms of knowledge.

Progress in elementary school reading linked to growth of cortical responses to familiar letter combinations within visual word forms.

Learning to read depends on the ability to extract precise details of letter combinations, which convey critical information that distinguishes tens of thousands of visual word forms. To support fluent reading skill, one crucial neural developmental process is one's brain sensitivity to statistical constraints inherent in combining letters into visual word forms. To test this idea in early readers, we tracked the impact of two years of schooling on within-subject longitudinal changes in cortical responses to three different properties of words: coarse tuning for print, and fine tuning to either familiar letter combinations within visual word forms or whole word representations.

Groupitizing reflects conceptual developments in math cognition and inequities in math achievement from childhood through adolescence.

Understanding the cognitive processes central to mathematical development is crucial to addressing systemic inequities in math achievement. We investigate the "Groupitizing" ability in 1209 third to eighth graders (mean age at first timepoint = 10.48, 586 girls, 39.

Lexical and sublexical cortical tuning for print revealed by Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) in early readers.

There are multiple levels of processing relevant to reading that vary in their visual, sublexical, and lexical orthographic processing demands. Segregating distinct cortical sources for each of these levels has been challenging in EEG studies of early readers. To address this challenge, we applied recent advances in analyzing high-density EEG using Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) via data-driven Reliable Components Analysis (RCA) in a group of early readers spanning from kindergarten to second grade.

Location matters: Regional variation in association of community burden of COVID-19 with caregiver and youth worry.

Our study characterized associations between three indicators of COVID-19's community-level impact in 20 geographically diverse metropolitan regions and how worried youth and their caregivers in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study have been about COVID-19. County-level COVID-19 case/death rates and monthly unemployment rates were geocoded to participants' addresses. Caregivers' (vs.

The Pandemic's Toll on Young Adolescents: Prevention and Intervention Targets to Preserve Their Mental Health.

Purpose: Adolescence is characterized by dramatic physical, social, and emotional changes, making teens particularly vulnerable to the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This longitudinal study identifies young adolescents who are most vulnerable to the psychological toll of the pandemic and provides insights to inform strategies to help adolescents cope better in times of crisis.

Methods: A data-driven approach was applied to a longitudinal, demographically diverse cohort of more than 3,000 young adolescents (11-14 years) participating in the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study in the United States, including multiple prepandemic visits and three assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic (May-August 2020).

Distinct neural sources underlying visual word form processing as revealed by steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP).

EEG has been central to investigations of the time course of various neural functions underpinning visual word recognition. Recently the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) paradigm has been increasingly adopted for word recognition studies due to its high signal-to-noise ratio. Such studies, however, have been typically framed around a single source in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT).

Early Adolescent Substance Use Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Survey in the ABCD Study Cohort.

Purpose: Evaluate changes in early adolescent substance use during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic using a prospective, longitudinal, nationwide cohort.

Methods: Participants were enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. A total of 7,842 youth (mean age = 12.

A probabilistic approach for quantifying children's subitizing span.

The development of enumeration skills over childhood is thought to reflect improvements in both subitizing (for small sets) and serial counting (for larger sets). However, investigations into the contribution of subitizing to advancing mathematics ability are limited by challenges in measuring subitizing capacity across developmental populations. Subitizing capacity in adults is traditionally assessed by calculating the bilinear inflection point for reaction times or accuracy across set sizes, but in children greater variability and dramatic improvements in counting ability introduce problems with this approach.

Replicability of neural responses to speech accent is driven by study design and analytical parameters.

Recent studies have reported evidence that listeners' brains process meaning differently in speech with an in-group as compared to an out-group accent. However, among studies that have used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine neural correlates of semantic processing of speech in different accents, the details of findings are often in conflict, potentially reflecting critical variations in experimental design and/or data analysis parameters. To determine which of these factors might be driving inconsistencies in results across studies, we systematically investigate how analysis parameter sets from several of these studies impact results obtained from our own EEG data set.

Attentional Processes in Children With Attentional Problems or Reading Difficulties as Revealed Using Brain Event-Related Potentials and Their Source Localization.

Visual attention-related processes include three functional sub-processes: alerting, orienting, and inhibition. We examined these sub-processes using reaction times, event-related potentials (ERPs), and their neuronal source activations during the Attention Network Test (ANT) in control children, attentional problems (AP) children, and reading difficulties (RD) children. During the ANT, electroencephalography was measured using 128 electrodes on three groups of Finnish sixth-graders aged 12-13 years (control = 77; AP = 15; RD = 23).

Distinct Representations of Magnitude and Spatial Position within Parietal Cortex during Number-Space Mapping.

Mapping numbers onto space is foundational to mathematical cognition. These cognitive operations are often conceptualized in the context of a "mental number line" and involve multiple brain regions in or near the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) that have been implicated both in numeral and spatial cognition. Here we examine possible differentiation of function within these brain areas in relating numbers to spatial positions.

Event-related potential differences in children supplemented with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids during infancy.

Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCPUFA) have been shown to be necessary for early retinal and brain development, but long-term cognitive benefits of LCPUFA in infancy have not been definitively established. The present study sought to determine whether LCPUFA supplementation during the first year of life would result in group differences in behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) while performing a task requiring response inhibition (Go/No-Go) at 5.5 years of age.

Does Music Training Enhance Literacy Skills? A Meta-Analysis.

Children's engagement in music practice is associated with enhancements in literacy-related language skills, as demonstrated by multiple reports of correlation across these two domains. Training studies have tested whether engaging in music training directly transfers benefit to children's literacy skill development. Results of such studies, however, are mixed.

Hemispheric specialization for visual words is shaped by attention to sublexical units during initial learning.

Selective attention to grapheme-phoneme mappings during learning can impact the circuitry subsequently recruited during reading. Here we trained literate adults to read two novel scripts of glyph words containing embedded letters under different instructions. For one script, learners linked each embedded letter to its corresponding sound within the word (grapheme-phoneme focus); for the other, decoding was prevented so entire words had to be memorized.

The emergence of "groupitizing" in children's numerical cognition.

Improvements in enumeration abilities that emerge over late childhood are primarily thought to reflect perceptual developments such as increases in subitizing limits for small sets and faster shifting of attention associated with serially counting larger sets. Contributions of conceptual knowledge development, such as the growing appreciation of how whole numbers are composed of subsets of whole numbers, are not as well understood. This study examined the emergence of a process referred to as "groupitizing," which captures how children may capitalize on grouping information to facilitate enumeration processes.

The cognitive mechanisms of the SNARC effect: an individual differences approach.

Access to mental representations of smaller vs. larger number symbols is associated with leftward vs. rightward spatial locations, as represented on a number line.

Selective attention to phonology dynamically modulates initial encoding of auditory words within the left hemisphere.

Selective attention to phonology, i.e., the ability to attend to sub-syllabic units within spoken words, is a critical precursor to literacy acquisition.

Mise en place: setting the stage for thought and action.

A school became safer after security measures were removed. Children can learn better in playful, rather than didactic, settings. At-risk students earned higher grades after writing about a personal value.

Neuroimaging correlates of handwriting quality as children learn to read and write.

Reading and writing are related but separable processes that are crucial skills to possess in modern society. The neurobiological basis of reading acquisition and development, which critically depends on phonological processing, and to a lesser degree, beginning writing as it relates to letter perception, are increasingly being understood. Yet direct relationships between writing and reading development, in particular, with phonological processing is not well understood.