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

认知发展指的是一套广泛的认知技能，帮助我们学习、对环境做出反应、产生新想法，并将现有知识应用于新情况。虽然许多研究都集中在认知的行为测量上，如注意力、工作记忆和处理速度，但当单独使用时，这一方法对典型和非典型发展的解释是“表面的”，根据任何测试的高分或低分。这首先忽略了这些分数背后的机械性过程，例如遗传影响(Mollon等人，2018年)，以及不同大脑区域之间的功能和结构连接(Menon，2013；Uddin等人，2013)。因此，本项目旨在通过建立一个多层次的纵向认知框架，追踪遗传对结构和功能连通性的影响，进而对行为测量的神经认知重组的影响来改进这项研究。我将使用大型的、预先存在的数据集以及遗传、神经成像和行为测量来回答这些问题。我将重点介绍遗传学如何驱动大脑的结构和功能发展，以及当预测不同的认知核心时，这些关系可能会如何改变。通过三角测量证据，我的目标是探索一种多层次的方法如何帮助我们理解认知发展变化潜在的机械过程。

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.