Age group and sex differences in performance on a computerized neurocognitive battery in children age 8–21

By Ruben C. Gur, J. Richard, Monica E. Calkins, R. Chiavacci, John A. Hansen, W. Bilker, James Loughead, John J. Connolly, H. Qiu, F. Mentch and 3 more. Neuropsychology, 2012

500 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Objective Examine age group effects and sex differences by applying a comprehensive computerized battery of identical behavioral measures linked to brain systems in youths that were already genotyped. Such information is needed to incorporate behavioral data as neuropsychological “biomarkers” in large-scale genomic studies. Method We developed and applied a brief computerized neurocognitive battery that provides measures of performance accuracy and response time for executive-control, episodic memory, complex cognition, social cognition and sensorimotor speed domains. We tested a population-based sample of 3500 genotyped youths ages 8–21 years. Results Substantial improvement with age occurred for both accuracy and speed, but the rates varied by domain. The most pronounced improvement was noted in executive control functions, specifically attention, and in motor speed, with some effect sizes exceeding 1.8 standard deviation units. The least pronounced age group effect was in memory, where only face memory showed a large effect size on improved accuracy. Sex differences had much smaller effect sizes but were evident, with females outperforming males on attention, word and face memory, reasoning speed and all social cognition tests and males outperforming females in spatial processing and sensorimotor and motor speed. These sex differences in most domains were seen already at the youngest age groups, and age group × sex interactions indicated divergence at the oldest groups with females becoming faster but less accurate than males. Conclusions The results indicate that cognitive performance improves substantially in this age span, with large effect sizes that differ by domain. The more pronounced improvement for executive and reasoning domains than for memory suggests that memory capacities have reached their apex before age 8. Performance was sexually modulated and most sex differences were apparent by early adolescence.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c819e72c11482a89eca197e2fb1e520547d362d4

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Citations in the corpus

Sex differences in anxiety and depression clinical perspectives (2014, background): “Similarly, fetal growth restriction and preterm birth are associated with more neurologic deficits in males than females (Halpern, 2007; Gur et al., 2012).”
The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort: A Publicly Available Resource for the Study of Normal and Abnormal Brain Development in Youth (2015, unknown): “As part of the PNC, the Penn CNBwas simplified for the pediatric population and shortened to a 1-hour administration time (Gur et al., 2014; Gur et al., 2012; Gur et al., 2010).”
Sex differences in the adult human brain: Evidence from 5,216 UK Biobank participants (2017, background): “Whether such an effect can help explain higher average female ability in domains like social cognition (Gur et al. 2012), and whether such functional differences can be integrated with differences in the structural connectome (Ingalhalikar et al.”
Executive Function: Implications for Education. NCER 2017-2000. (2016, background): “Children between the ages of 11 and 14 years, tested in the morning or afternoon, have been shown to perform better on measures of EF when tested at their optimal (versus non-optimal) times of day, even when controlling for sleep duration on the previous night (Hahn et al. 2012; see also Goldstein e”
Psychometric Properties of the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery (2014, unknown): “Here we examined the factorial structure of the CNB in a sample of over 9,000 individuals age 8 to 21 who were administered the CNB as part of their participation in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC; Gur et al., 2012, 2013).”
An Improved Framework for Confound Regression and Filtering for Control of Motion Artifact in the Preprocessing of Resting-State Functional Connectivity Data (2012, background): “…the Center for Applied Genomics (CAG) at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn); full study design and procedures are described elsewhere (Gur et al., 2012; Satterthwaite et al., 2012a; Satterthwaite et al., 2012b).”
Executive function and theory of mind as predictors of aggressive and prosocial behavior and peer acceptance in early childhood (2017, background): “Girls have also been found to exhibit greater EF and ToM skills (Gur et al., 2012).”
Neuroimaging of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (2013, unknown): “As previously described (Gur et al., 2012), the 1-hour Penn computerized neurocognitive battery (Penn CNB) was administered to all participants.”