Congratulations to MRC CBU’s Delia Fuhrmann, Ivan Simpson-Kent, Joe Bathelt, the CALM team and Rogier Kievit, who created ‘The Neurocognitive Architecture of Fluid Ability in Children and Adolescents’ poster, which won a poster prize at the Cambridge Neuroscience Seminar 2018 on 12 March.

The one-day interdisciplinary meeting on mental plasticity and development was held at Robinson College with around 300 delegates.

The poster presented data from on-going project on fluid ability or fluid intelligence, which is the ability to solve novel problems, and a strong predictor of educational and health outcomes. Investigating data from 551 children and adolescents in the Centre for Attention, Learning and Memory (CALM) sample, the authors showed that white matter microstructure in the brain predicts intermediate cognitive abilities like working memory capacity and processing speed, which in turn predict fluid ability. White matter, working memory and processing speed jointly explain about 50% of the variance in fluid ability. These results highlight that the neurocognitive architecture of fluid ability reflects a hierarchical, many-to-one mapping between white matter, working memory, processing speed and fluid ability.

Information about the Cambridge Neuroscience event can be found here: https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/events/event.php?permalink=78f6baff00