Functional MRI research involving healthy children: Ethics, safety and recommended procedures

Parent-child couples display shared neural fingerprints while listening to stories

Neural fingerprinting is a method to identify individuals from a group of people. Here, we established a new connectome-based identification model and used diffusion maps to show that biological parent-child couples share functional connectivity patterns while listening to stories. These shared fingerprints enabled the identification of children and their biological parents from a group of parents and children. Functional patterns were evident in both cognitive and sensory brain networks. Defining "typical" shared biological parent-child brain patterns may enable predicting or even preventing impaired parent-child connections that develop due to genetic or environmental causes. Finally, we argue that the proposed framework opens new opportunities to link similarities in connectivity patterns to behavioral, psychological, and medical phenomena among other populations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to reveal the neural fingerprint that represents distinct biological parent-child couples.

Structural white matter characteristics for working memory and switching/inhibition in children with reading difficulties: The role of the left superior longitudinal fasciculus

Reading difficulties (RDs) are characterized by slow and inaccurate reading as well as additional challenges in cognitive control (i.e., executive functions, especially in working memory, inhibition, and visual attention). Despite evidence demonstrating differences in these readers' language and visual processing abilities, white matter differences associated with executive functions (EFs) difficulties in children with RDs are scarce. Structural correlates for reading and EFs in 8- to 12-year-old children with RDs versus typical readers (TRs) were examined using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data. Results suggest that children with RDs showed significantly lower reading and EF abilities versus TRs. Lower fractional anisotropy (FA) in left temporo-parietal tracts was found in children with RDs, who also showed positive correlations between reading and working memory and switching/inhibition scores and FA in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). FA in the left SLF predicted working memory performance mediated by reading ability in children with RDs but not TRs. Our findings support alterations in white matter tracts related to working memory, switching/inhibition, and overall EF challenges in children with RDs and the linkage between working memory difficulties and FA alterations in the left SLF in children with RDs via reading.