Children learn an incredible amount whilst at school. Many fundamental skills that typical adults perform effortlessly like reading and maths have to be acquired during childhood. Childhood and adolescence are also a period of important brain development. Particularly the structural connections in the brain show a prolonged maturation that extends throughout childhood and adolescence up to the third decade of life. We are beginning to explore how changes in brain structure over this time support the acquisition of these skills, but also how brain changes may give rise to difficulty developing these skills for some children.
Most research to date has focussed on comparisons of individuals with specific deficits like very low reading performance despite typical performance in other areas. The logic behind this approach is that anatomical structures that are specifically associated with this skill can be isolated. However, learning disorders are rarely that specific. Most children struggling in one aspect of learning also have difficulties in other areas. Furthermore, recent advances in neuroscience suggest that the brain is not a collection of modules that perform particular tasks. In contrast, more recent views suggest that the brain functions as an integrated network.
In our recent study, we wanted to investigate how the white matter brain network may be related to maths and reading performance. The study revealed that children’s reading and maths scores were closely associated with the efficiency of their white matter network. The results further suggested that highly connected regions of the brain were particularly important. These findings indicate that the overall organisation may be more important for reading and maths than differences in very specific areas. This potentially provides a clue to understanding why problems in maths and reading often co-occur.
You can read a pre-print of the article here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jk6yb
The code for the analysis is also available: https://github.com/joebathelt/Learning_Connectome