A Longitudinal Multi-Layered Approach to Cognition Across Childhood and Adolescence

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Cognitive development refers to a broad set of cognitive skills that help us learn, respond to the environment, come upwith new ideas, and apply our existing knowledge to new situations. Although much research has focused on behaviouralmeasures of cognition, such as attention, working memory, and processing speed, when used alone, this approachoffers a 'surface-level' explanation for typical and atypical development, in terms of higher or lower scores on any settest. This ignores the mechanistic processes underlying these scores in the first place, such as genetic influences(Mollon et al., 2018), as well as functional and structural connectivity between different brain regions (Menon, 2013;Uddin et al., 2013). Therefore, this project aims to improve upon this research by building a multi-layer, longitudinalframework of cognition, tracing the genetic influences on structural and functional connectivity, and in turn the influenceof this on the neurocognitive reorganization of behavioural measures. I shall use large, pre-existing datasets with genetic,neuroimaging, and behavioural measures to answer these questions. I shall focus on how genetics may drive structuraland functional development in the brain, and how these relationships might change when predicting different cognitivescores. By triangulating evidence, I aim to explore how a multi-layered approach can help us understand mechanisticprocesses underlying changes developmental changes in cognition.