How can we acquire new knowledge and skills on a daily basis while remaining the same person?
I'm excited to share our new preprint led by @hyejinjadelee.bsky.social & Ally Dworetsky tackling this question, just in time for #OHBM2026:
doi.org/10.64898/202...
🧵👇
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky
What matters most for childhood brain organization?
We analyzed 649 variables.
The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers.
Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES.
In Science today: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
doi.org
Brain regions exhibit dynamic yet highly coordinated activity patterns that form large-scale functional networks measurable through resting-state correlations. While their association with fluctuating...
Thank you @crodriguezmdphd.bsky.social, @htagerf.bsky.social and co-chair Kale Edmiston for contributing your valuable insights in this important conversation!
The exposome is reflected in white matter structure! 🌲🧠
Outstanding new work led by @briana-mac.bsky.social shows that environmental context gets reflected in the structure of kids brains.
#neuroskyence #neuroimaging #devpsy #PsychSciSky
thread below 👇
SO PROUD of my amazing students representing team ACORN Lab @acornlab.bsky.social at #SOBP2026! I am the luckiest mentor! 🥰
Way to go Natalie, @caitiebaten.bsky.social and @heatherarobinson.bsky.social! 🎉
Excited to share our latest paper from the lab now out in BP:CNNI! 🌟Superstar postdoc @amarojha.bsky.social and I discuss individual differences in neurodevelopmental trajectories, highlight new work & share ideas for where we might go next!
#neuroskyence #neuroimaging #PsychSciSky #CogDev #DevPsy
Arielle Keller
Arielle Keller
The evidence is clear: socioeconomic conditions play an *enormous* role in brain development
Amazing work by @smarek0502.bsky.social &co
doi.org/10.1126/science.aee6213
+perspective by @lucindasisk.bsky.social & @ted-satterthwaite.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1126/science.aei3393
#neuroskyence #PsychSky
Arielle Keller
Arielle Keller
Arielle Keller
Also big thank you to @ariellekeller.bsky.social for organizing an outstanding @sobp-org.bsky.social Fireside Chat and discussion on protecting scientific integrity including Dr. Kale Edmiston and Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg! #SOBP2026 #OCD
How much does the childhood environment shape the brain?
In our new preprint, we study the exposome (300+ environmental exposures) and link it to white matter structure in 8,000+ kids. 🧠✨
🔗 Read the preprint: bit.ly/4wfsybZ
🧵 Thread below
Previous brain-wide association studies (BWAS) have linked specific environmental and behavioral variables to brain variability. In this work, we mapped 649 variables to children’s brains and compared...
doi.org
Arielle Keller
I had an amazing time attending SOBP 2026 in NYC! You can listen to a short recording of my poster presentation in the SOBP poster gallery if you search "V99"!
Come see the latest from ACORN Lab at #SOBP2026! 🐿️🧠🗽 Thread below! 👇
The childhood environment is critical for brain development. However, most neuroimaging studies examine individual environmental measures (e.g., socioeconomic status) or a limited set of exposures, obscuring how the combination of complex, real-world exposures jointly influence brain development. Here we investigated how white matter shape and tissue properties are linked to the childhood exposome, a multidimensional measure capturing over 300 environmental exposures. Using multi-shell diffusion MRI from 8,183 children (ages 9-10) in the ABCD study, we quantified microstructural and macrostructural properties across 62 person-specific white matter tracts. The exposome showed widespread and highly replicable associations with both white matter microstructure and macrostructure: more advantaged environments were associated with larger tract macrostructure and lower orientation dispersion. Principal component analysis revealed that the dominant axis of exposome-white matter covariation aligns with the cortical sensorimotor-association hierarchy, such that tracts spanning this hierarchy exhibit the strongest associations with the exposome. Multivariate models demonstrated that patterns of white matter features explained 25% of the variance in the exposome in unseen individuals. Notably, white matter-based prediction of cognition was markedly reduced after accounting for the exposome (~82% reduction in explained variance), indicating that brain-cognition associations overlap substantially with variance captured by the exposome. These findings generalized to independent data from the Healthy Brain Network (n=869), which differs substantially from ABCD in MRI acquisition, participant selection, and childhood environments. Together, these results suggest that white matter architecture strongly reflects the childhood environment. ### Competing Interest Statement A.A.B. has consulted for Octave Bioscience and holds equity in Centile Bioscience. RB is on the Advisory Board and holds equity in Taliaz Health. D.A.F. is a founder of Turing Medical. Any potential conflict of interest has been reviewed and managed by the University of Minnesota. D.A.F. is an inventor of the FIRMM Technology 2198 (FIRMM, real-time monitoring and prediction of motion in MRI scans, exclusively licensed to Turing Medical). Any potential conflict of interest has been reviewed and managed by the University of Minnesota. This research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (T32MH019112 to S.L.M.; R37MH125829 to D.A.F. and T.D.S.; 2R01MH112847 to R.T.S. and T.D.S.; R01MH120482 to T.D.S.; 2R01MH113550 to T.D.S.; R01MH123550 to R.T.S; F30MH138048 to K.Y.S.; RF1MH121868, RF1MH121867, RF1MH126699, R01AG060942, U19AG066567, R01EY033628, and R01EB027585 to A.R.; R01MH134886 to R.B.; T32MH016804 and T32MH018951 to V.J.S; R01MH133843 to A.A.B.; F31MH136685 to J.B.). S.L.M. was supported by the Hartwell Foundation (S.L.M.); G.S. was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). A.S.K. is supported by a NARSAD Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. M.D.H. was supported by the German Research Foundation (project number 572317568). LMS was supported by a NSF SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (#2507497).