Social 'envirotyping' the ABCD study contextualizes dissociable brain organization and diverging outcomes

Abstract

The environment, especially social features, plays a key role in shaping the development of the brain, notably during adolescence. To better understand variation in brain-environment coupling and its associated outcomes, we identified "envirotypes," or different patterns of social environment experience, in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study by hierarchically clustering subjects. Two focal clusters, which accounted for 89.3% of all participants, differed significantly on eight out of nine youth-report social environment quality measures, representing almost perfect complements. We then applied tools from network neuroscience to show different envirotypes are associated with different patterns of whole brain functional connectivity. Differences were distributed across the brain but were especially prominent in Default and Somatomotor Hand systems for these focal clusters. Finally, we examined how social envirotypes change over development and how these patterns of change are associated with a suite of outcomes. The resulting dynamic envirotypes differed along dimensions of stability and quality, but outcomes diverged based on stability. Specifically, the stable, high quality envirotype was most easily distinguished from the improving envirotype, while the unstable envirotype was associated with the worst outcomes. Altogether, our findings represent significant contributions to both social developmental neuroscience and network neuroscience, emphasizing the variability and dynamicity of brain-environment coupling and its consequences.