Imaging Technologies That Predict Cognitive Development Studied

Assessing structural and functional changes in the brain may predict future memory performance in healthy children, according to new findings. These new insights provide clues into cognitive development and suggest magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other approaches may soon help identify children at risk for developmental challenges earlier than current testing technology allow.

The study’s findings were published January 29, 2014, in the Journal of Neuroscience. Working memory capacity, i.e., the ability to hold on to information for a short period, is one of the strongest predictors of future accomplishments in math and reading. Whereas earlier studies revealed that MRI scanning could predict current working memory performance in children, scientists were uncertain whether MRI could predict their future cognitive capacity.

In the current study, Henrik Ullman, Rita Almeida, PhD, and Torkel Klingberg, MD, PhD, from the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden), evaluated the cognitive abilities of a group of healthy children and adolescents and measured each child’s brain structure and function using MRI scanning. Based on the MRI data gathered during this initial testing, the researchers discovered they could predict the children’s working memory performance two years later, a prediction that was not possible using the cognitive tests.

“Our results suggest that future cognitive development can be predicted from anatomical and functional information offered by MRI above and beyond that currently achieved by cognitive tests,” said Dr. Ullman, the lead author of the study. “This has wide implications for understanding the neural mechanisms of cognitive development.”

The scientists recruited 62 children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 20 years to the lab, where they completed reasoning and working memory tests. They also received multiple MRI scans to evaluate brain structure and alterations in brain activity as they performed a working memory task. The study group, two years after, returned to the lab to perform the same cognitive tests.

Using a statistical model, the investigators evaluated whether MRI data obtained during the first testing correlated with the children’s working memory performance during the follow-up visit. They showed that while brain activity in the frontal cortex correlated with children’s working memory at the time of the first tests, activity in the basal ganglia and thalamus predicted how well children scored on the working memory tests two years later.

“This study is another contribution to the growing body of neuroimaging research that yields insights into unraveling present and predicting future cognitive capacity in development,” said Judy Illes, PhD, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada). “However, the appreciation of this important new knowledge is simpler than its application to everyday life. How a child performs today and tomorrow relies on multiple positive and negative life events that cannot be assessed by today’s technology alone.”

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Karolinska Institutet