Poster #8 - Disentangling Schooling and Age Effects on Children’s White Matter Networks of Reading and Arithmetic.

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

One critical experience in early childhood is children’s transition from preschool to formal schooling, where they learn to read and to calculate. This transition is characterized by a shift from learning in a playful, less-structured preschool environment to learning by formal, explicit instruction in first grade. Interestingly, this milestone falls right within the “5-to-7-shift”(Sameroff & Haith, 1996; White, 1965), a period during which children show remarkable improvements in cognitive abilities, which might originate from an interaction between the child’s brain maturation and cultural-environmental opportunities (Morrison et al., 2005; Sameroff & Haith, 1996). To date, it remains unclear to which extent children’s brain development in this 5-to-7-age is driven by maturational changes or by changes in the exposure to formal schooling. There are a small number of studies, albeit only in the field of reading and not in arithmetic, that compared children before and after the start of formal schooling and observed an increase in Fractional Anisotropy (FA) in reading-related tracts (Arcuate Fasciculus and Inferior Fronto-Occipital Fasciculus) during the first two years of reading instruction (Vanderauwera et al., 2017), with the changes in white matter connectivity between the Visual Word Form Area and the parietal cortex being related to the degree of reading improvement during the first year of formal schooling (Moulton et al., 2019). A critical limitation of these longitudinal studies is that they do not allow to isolate age-related maturational from schooling-related effects. A clever way to (quasi-) experimentally address this issue is the longitudinal school cut-off design (Morrison et al., 1995), which compares children who are similar in age but different in the amount of schooling they receive. We use for the first time such a longitudinal school cut-off design to experimentally disentangle the effects of maturation and schooling on children’s white matter networks supporting reading and arithmetic. To answer this question, we recruited 5-year-old children who were born right before or right after the official cut-off date for school. All children underwent an MRI-scan and behavioral testing at two timepoints: in summer 2021 (n=65), when all children attended play-oriented preschool and one year later, in summer 2022 (n=58), when about half of the children had experienced their first year of schooling whereas the others had remained in preschool. Children were matched on multiple cognitive variables at preschooler age. A full data-analysis plan is accepted for publication as registered report (Vandecruys et al., accepted). All data is collected and will be analyzed accordingly in the coming months. We will use an automatized method (AFQ) (Yeatman et al., 2012) to identify and quantify five major white matter tracts that have been correlated with reading and arithmetic (Arcuate Fasciculus (anterior and direct), Inferior Fronto-Occipital Fasciculus, Inferior Longitudinal Fasciculus, Corpus Callosum) and test via Bayesian analyses whether development in these tracts is affected by schooling, age-related maturation or by both. This study will reveal how an ecologically valid source of learning, going to school, influences children’s white matter development, contributing to a major conundrum in developmental science.

Authors

• Floor Vandecruys, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven)
  Presenting Author

• Maaike Vandermosten

• Bert De Smedt, University of Leuven