Baseline brain function in the preadolescents of the ABCD Study

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study(R) is a 10-year longitudinal study of children recruited at ages 9 and 10. A battery of neuroimaging tasks are administered biennially to track neurodevelopment and identify individual differences in brain function. This study reports activation patterns from functional MRI (fMRI) tasks completed at baseline, which were designed to measure cognitive impulse control with a stop signal task (SST; N = 5,547), reward anticipation and receipt with a monetary incentive delay (MID) task (N = 6,657) and working memory and emotion reactivity with an emotional N-back (EN-back) task (N = 6,009). Further, we report the spatial reproducibility of activation patterns by assessing between-group vertex/voxelwise correlations of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activation. Analyses reveal robust brain activations that are consistent with the published literature, vary across fMRI tasks/contrasts and slightly correlate with individual behavioral performance on the tasks. These results establish the preadolescent brain function baseline, guide interpretation of cross-sectional analyses and will enable the investigation of longitudinal changes during adolescent development. This paper reports activation patterns for fMRI tasks assessing response inhibition, working memory and reward processing obtained at baseline in the longitudinal ABCD Study, providing a reference for research into adolescent brain development.

Automated summary

The ABCD Study is a 10-year longitudinal study aiming to track neurodevelopment and individual differences in brain function. Activation patterns from three different fMRI tasks completed at baseline were reported, showing robust brain activations consistent with previous literature.