TY - JOUR
T1 - Differences in brain morphology and working memory capacity across childhood
AU - Bathelt, Joe
AU - Gathercole, Susan E.
AU - Johnson, Amy
AU - Astle, Duncan E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Medical Research Council
Funding Information:
The Centre for Attention Learning and Memory (CALM) research clinic at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge (CBSU) is supported by funding from the Medical Research Council of Great Britain to Duncan Astle, Susan Gathercole and Tom Manly. The clinic is led by Joni Holmes and managed by Francesca Woolgar. Data collection is assisted by a team of PhD students and researchers at the CBSU that includes Agnieszka Jaroslawska, Sally Butterfield, Amy Johnson, Erica Bottacin, Erin Hawkins, Gemma Crickmore, Laura Forde, Sinead O’Brien, and Sara Gharooni. The authors wish to thank the many professionals working in children’s services in the South-East and East of England for their support, and to the children and their families for giving up their time to visit the clinic.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 The Authors. Developmental Science Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2018/5
Y1 - 2018/5
N2 - Working memory (WM) skills are closely associated with learning progress in key areas such as reading and mathematics across childhood. As yet, however, little is known about how the brain systems underpinning WM develop over this critical developmental period. The current study investigated whether and how structural brain correlates of components of the working memory system change over development. Verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory were assessed in 153 children between 5.58 and 15.92 years, and latent components of the working memory system were derived. Fractional anisotropy and cortical thickness maps were derived from T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted MRI and processed using eigenanatomy decomposition. There was a greater involvement of the corpus callosum and posterior temporal white matter in younger children for performance associated with the executive part of the working memory system. For older children, this was more closely linked with the thickness of the occipitotemporal cortex. These findings suggest that increasing specialization leads to shifts in the contribution of neural substrates over childhood, moving from an early dependence on a distributed system supported by long-range connections to later reliance on specialized local circuitry. Our findings demonstrate that despite the component factor structure being stable across childhood, the underlying brain systems supporting working memory change. Taking the age of the child into account, and not just their overall score, is likely to be critical for understanding the nature of the limitations on their working memory capacity.
AB - Working memory (WM) skills are closely associated with learning progress in key areas such as reading and mathematics across childhood. As yet, however, little is known about how the brain systems underpinning WM develop over this critical developmental period. The current study investigated whether and how structural brain correlates of components of the working memory system change over development. Verbal and visuospatial short-term and working memory were assessed in 153 children between 5.58 and 15.92 years, and latent components of the working memory system were derived. Fractional anisotropy and cortical thickness maps were derived from T1-weighted and diffusion-weighted MRI and processed using eigenanatomy decomposition. There was a greater involvement of the corpus callosum and posterior temporal white matter in younger children for performance associated with the executive part of the working memory system. For older children, this was more closely linked with the thickness of the occipitotemporal cortex. These findings suggest that increasing specialization leads to shifts in the contribution of neural substrates over childhood, moving from an early dependence on a distributed system supported by long-range connections to later reliance on specialized local circuitry. Our findings demonstrate that despite the component factor structure being stable across childhood, the underlying brain systems supporting working memory change. Taking the age of the child into account, and not just their overall score, is likely to be critical for understanding the nature of the limitations on their working memory capacity.
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U2 - 10.1111/desc.12579
DO - 10.1111/desc.12579
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85026296354
SN - 1363-755X
VL - 21
JO - Developmental Science
JF - Developmental Science
IS - 3
M1 - e12579
ER -