Personalized functional brain network topography is associated with individual differences in youth cognition

Individual differences in cognition during childhood are associated with important social, physical, and mental health outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Quantifying variation in the topography of functional brain networks across the developing cortex may provide insight regarding individual differences in cognition. This study defines personalized functional networks (PFNs) in 9–10 year olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Across matched discovery (n = 3525) and replication (n = 3447) samples, the total cortical representation of fronto-parietal PFNs positively correlates with general cognition. Cross-validated ridge regressions trained on PFN topography predict cognition in unseen data across domains, with prediction accuracy increasing along the cortex's sensorimotor-association organizational axis. These results establish that functional network topography heterogeneity is associated with individual differences in cognition before adolescence.

Arielle S. Keller, Adam R. Pines, Sheila Shanmugan, Valerie J. Sydnor, Zaixu Cui, Maxwell A. Bertolero, Ran Barzilay, Aaron F. Alexander-Bloch, Nora Byington, Andrew Chen, Gregory M. Conan, Christos Davatzikos, Eric Feczko, Timothy J. Hendrickson, Audrey Houghton, Bart Larsen, Hongming Li, Oscar Miranda-Dominguez, David R. Roalf, Anders Perrone, Alisha Shetty, Russell T. Shinohara, Yong Fan, Damien A. Fair, Theodore D. Satterthwaite