Determining the association between cortical morphology and cognition in 10,145 children from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study using the MOSTest

During development individuals undergo protracted changes in cortical morphology, which coincide with changes in cognition. A number of studies have measured the association between brain structure and cognition in children, however these frequently rely on mass univariate statistics or ROI-based comparisons and do not always measure cortical morphology relative to global brain measures. After controlling for global brain measures, we can see a residual regionalisation pattern indicating the size or thickness of different regions relative to the total cortical surface area or mean thickness. Individual variability in this regionalisation may be important for predicting between subject variability in cognitive performance. Here we sought to determine whether the relative configuration of cortical architecture across the whole cortex was associated with cognition using a novel multivariate omnibus statistical test (MOSTest). This method is optimally powered to detect associations that are widely distributed across the cortex. We then used the Polyvertex score (PVS) to quantify the magnitude of the association between vertex-wise cortical morphology and cognitive performance. We have determined that the relative pattern of cortical architecture, after removing the variance associated with global brain measures, predicted unique variance associated with cognition across different modalities.