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

Cognitive development refers to a broad set of cognitive skills that help us learn, respond to the environment, come up
with new ideas, and apply our existing knowledge to new situations. Although much research has focused on behavioural
measures of cognition, such as attention, working memory, and processing speed, when used alone, this approach
offers a 'surface-level' explanation for typical and atypical development, in terms of higher or lower scores on any set
test. 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, longitudinal
framework of cognition, tracing the genetic influences on structural and functional connectivity, and in turn the influence
of 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 structural
and functional development in the brain, and how these relationships might change when predicting different cognitive
scores. By triangulating evidence, I aim to explore how a multi-layered approach can help us understand mechanistic
processes underlying changes developmental changes in cognition.