Influence of Demographic, Socio-economic, and Brain Structural Factors on Adolescent Neurocognition: A Correlation Analysis in the ABCD Initiative

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) initiative is a longitudinal study aimed at characterizing brain development from childhood through adolescence and identifying key biological and environmental factors that influence this development. The study measures neurocognitive abilities across a multidimensional array of functions, with a focus on the critical period of adolescence during which physical and socio-emotional changes occur and the structure of the cortical and white matter changes. In this study, we perform a correlation analysis to examine the linear relation of adolescent neurocognition functions with the demographic, socio-economic, and magnetic resonance imaging-based brain structural factors. The overall goal is to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how natural and nurtural factors influence adolescent neurocognition. Our results on > 10,000 adolescents show many positive and negative statistical significance interrelations of different neurocognitive functions with the demographic, socioeconomic, and brain structural factors, and also open up questions inviting further future studies.