Anthony Dick

• Florida International University

Objective There is support for altered parasympathetic (PNS) and sympathetic (SNS) functioning among children with disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) which may underlie impairments in both emotion regulation (ER) and executive functioning (EF). This study examined the extent to which cardiac autonomic balance (CAB), a composite index that integrat...

Understanding the structural development of the neural speech network in early childhood is critical for characterizing speech acquisition. This study investigated speech in the developing brain by scanning 94 children aged 4-7 years using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) MRI. To increase sample size and performance variability, children with atten...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development® (ABCD) Study provides a unique opportunity to investigate developmental processes in a large, diverse cohort of youths, aged approximately 9–10 at baseline and assessed annually for 10 years. Given the size and complexity of the ABCD Study, researchers analyzing its data will encounter a myriad of methodo...

Objective: To examine differences in parenting factors among caregivers with children with and without externalizing behavior problems (EBP) in a community homeless shelter sample versus a stable housing sample. Method: Nine hundred and fourteen children (ages = 2.01-7.49 years, SD = 1.45 years, 40.8% female, 54.3% Black, 46.7% Hispanic) were re...

Characterizing the structural development of the neural speech network in early childhood is important for understanding speech acquisition. To investigate speech in the developing brain, 94 children aged 4-7-years-old at risk for early speech disorder were scanned using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Additionall...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study represents a pioneering initiative aimed at unraveling the complexities of behavioral and neural development in youth. In this paper, we address the multifaceted challenges inherent in extracting meaningful insights from the extensive data compiled by the ABCD initiative. Our focus is on advoc...

This paper addresses the challenges of managing missing values within expansive longitudinal neu-roimaging datasets, using the specific example of data derived from the Adolescent Brain and Cog-nitive Development (ABCD ® ) study. The conventional listwise deletion method, while widely used, is not recommended due to the risk that substantial bias c...

Children growing up in communities with limited resources and high levels of adversity face academic challenges. One measure of community factors, the Child Opportunity Index (COI), is a composite index measured at the census tract level that captures neighborhood resources and conditions (i.e., access to quality education, healthcare, and economic...

Community factors are associated with both children’s mental health and physical health. One measure of community factors, the Child Opportunity Index (COI), is a composite index measured at the census tract level that captures neighborhood resources and conditions. While greater COI has been found to relate to better overall physical health in old...

Spatial ability is defined as a cognitive or intellectual skill used to represent, transform, generate, and recall information of an object or the environment. Individual differences across spatial tasks have been strongly linked to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) interest and success. Several variables have been proposed t...

Individual differences in spatial thinking are predictive of children's math and science achievement and later entry into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Little is known about whether parent characteristics predict individual differences in children's spatial thinking. This study aims to understand whether, and...

Objective: We sought to explore if specific domains of emotion dysregulation (emotion regulation [EREG], emotional reactivity/lability [EREL], emotion recognition/understanding [ERU], and callous-unemotional [CU] behaviors) were uniquely associated with diagnostic classifications. Method: This study utilized a multimodal (parent/teacher [P/T] re...

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) symptom profiles are known to undergo changes throughout development, rendering the neurobiological assessment of ADHD challenging across different developmental stages. Particularly in young children (ages 4 to 7 years), measuring inhibitory control network activity in the brain has been a formidable...

Objective: To test two non-exclusive mechanisms by which parental monitoring might reduce teen substance use. The first mechanism is that monitoring increases punishment for substance use, since parents who monitor more are more likely to find out when substance use occurs (M1). The second mechanism is that monitoring directly prevents/averts teen...

Limited options exist to evaluate the development of hippocampal function in young children. Research has established that trace eyeblink conditioning (EBC) relies on a functional hippocampus. Hence, we set out to investigate whether trace EBC is linked to hippocampal structure, potentially serving as a valuable indicator of hippocampal development...

Objective To assess differences in child physical health outcomes and metrices associated with obesity in a sample of predominantly Hispanic/Latinx young children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Methods Participants included 127 children diagnosed with ADHD and 96 typically developing (TD) children between 4 and 7...

Objective: During the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents and families have turned to online activities and social platforms more than ever to maintain well-being, connect remotely with friends and family, and online schooling. However, excessive screen use can have negative effects on health (e.g., sleep). This study examined changes in sleep habits an...

Background Population-based neuroscience offers opportunities to examine important but understudied sociocultural factors such as acculturation. Acculturation refers to the extent to which an individual retains their cultural heritage and/or adopts the receiving society’s culture and is particularly salient among Hispanic/Latinx immigrants. Specifi...

The hippocampus is a complex structure composed of distinct subfields. It has been central to understanding neural foundations of episodic memory. In the current cross‐sectional study, using a large sample of 830, 3‐ to 21‐year‐olds from a unique, publicly available dataset we examined the following questions: (1) Is there elevated grey matter volu...

Objective: Many studies have shown that parental knowledge/monitoring is correlated with adolescent substance use, but the association may be confounded by the many preexisting differences between families with low versus high monitoring. We attempted to produce more rigorous evidence for a causal relation using a longitudinal design that took adva...

Neurobiological models of receptive language have focused on the left-hemisphere perisylvian cortex with the assumption that the cerebellum supports peri-linguistic cognitive processes such as verbal working memory. The goal of this study was to identify language-sensitive regions of the cerebellum then map the structural conectivity profile of the...

The current study aimed to identify the key neurobiology of attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as it relates to ADHD diagnostic category and symptoms of hyperactive/impulsive behaviour and inattention. To do so, we adapted a predictive modelling approach to identify the key structural and diffusion‐weighted brain imaging measures and...

Background Population-based neuroscience offers opportunities to examine important but understudied sociocultural factors, such as acculturation. Acculturation refers to the extent to which an individual retains their cultural heritage and/or adopts the receiving society’s culture and is particularly salient among Hispanic/Latinx immigrants. Specif...

Objective Infectious diseases, such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), are commonly transmitted by respiratory droplets and contact with contaminated surfaces. Individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to be infected with COVID-19 and experience more hospitalizations than individuals without ADHD. The cur...

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, families have experienced unprecedented financial and social disruptions. We studied the impact of preexisting psychosocial factors and pandemic‐related financial and social disruptions in relation to family well‐being among N = 4091 adolescents and parents during early summer 2020, participating in the Adolescent Brai...

Much remains to be learned about the role(s) of the cerebellum in the neurobiology of language. Contemporary models have focused extensively on the left-hemisphere perisylvian cortex with the assumption that the cerebellum supports more peri-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., verbal working memory). The goal of this study was to map the structur...

Lower financial savings among individuals experiencing adverse social determinants of health (SDoH) increases vulnerabilities during times of crisis. SDoH including low socioeconomic status (low-SES) influence cognitive abilities as well as health and life outcomes that may perpetuate poverty and disparities. Despite evidence suggesting a role for...

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e., inhib...

Format changes in U.S. schooling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic varied by month and by school district, ranging from exclusively home-based to full in-person learning. The impact of these changes on adolescent schooling experiences, and the factors that mitigate such impact, have been challenging to quantify. To address these challenges we em...

Socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with larger COVID-19 disease burdens and pandemic-related economic impacts. We utilized the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to understand how family- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage relate to disease burden, family communication, and preventative responses to the p...

The hippocampus is a complex structure composed of several distinct subfields and has been at the center of scientific study examining the neural foundations of episodic memory. To date, there is little consensus regarding the structural development of the hippocampus and its subfields assessed both volumetrically and through anatomical connectivit...

Energy compensation indices are commonly used to examine self-regulation of food intake in children. However, previous studies failed to consider children's ability to self-regulate under complete autonomy. This study examined self-regulation of food intake among young children and the effect of calorie manipulation on food/nutrient intake using an...

Purpose Adolescence is characterized by dramatic physical, social, and emotional changes, making teens particularly vulnerable to the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This longitudinal study identifies young adolescents who are most vulnerable to the psychological toll of the pandemic and provides insights to inform strategies to hel...

Parental knowledge/monitoring is negatively associated with adolescents' depressive symptoms, suggesting monitoring could be a target for prevention and treatment. However, no study has rigorously addressed the possibility that this association is spurious, leaving the clinical and etiological implications unclear. The goal of this study was to con...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) put millions of children at risk for later health problems. As childhood represents a critical developmental period, it is important to understand how ACEs impact brain development in young children. In addition, children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely than typically develop...

The current study examined the relations between hippocampal structure (e.g., volume and neurite density) and performance on a trace eye blink conditioning (EBC) task in young children. Our first aim assessed whether individual differences in hippocampal volume were associated with trace EBC performance, using both percent Conditioned Responses (%...

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder marked by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsiveness. The importance of the Superior Longitudinal Fasciculus II (SLFII), a white matter tract connecting the frontal and parietal regions, to developing executive function has not been established in c...

The ability to dissociate axonal density in vivo from other microstructural properties is important for the diagnosis and treatment of neurologic disease, and new methods to do so are being developed. We investigated one such method—restricted diffusion imaging (RDI)—to see whether it can more accurately replicate histological axonal density patter...

The human toll of disasters extends beyond death, injury and loss. Post-traumatic stress (PTS) can be common among directly exposed individuals, and children are particularly vulnerable. Even children far removed from harm’s way report PTS, and media-based exposure may partially account for this phenomenon. In this study, we examine this issue usin...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study of 11,880 youth incorporates a comprehensive range of measures assessing predictors and outcomes related to mental health across childhood and adolescence in participating youth, as well as information about family mental health history. We have previously described the logic and content of th...

The current study aimed to identify the key neurobiology of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as it relates to ADHD diagnostic category and symptoms of hyperactive/impulsive behavior and inattention. To do so, we adapted a predictive modeling approach to identify the key structural and diffusion weighted brain imaging measures, and t...

Purpose Evaluate changes in early adolescent substance use during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic using a prospective, longitudinal, nationwide cohort. Methods Participants were enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. A total of 7,842 youth (mean age = 12.4 years, range = 10.5–14.6) at 21 study sites across t...

Etiological models highlight reduced punishment sensitivity as a core risk factor for disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) and callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The current study examined neural sensitivity to the anticipation and receipt of loss, one key aspect of punishment sensitivity, among youth with DBD, comparing those with and without CU trai...

Emotion dysregulation (ED) is prevalent among youth with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and significantly impacts functioning. Nuanced measurement of ED is central to understanding its role in this disorder and informing treatment approaches. The present study examined the factor structure of the Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC)...

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, mental health among youth has been negatively impacted. Youth with a history of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), as well as youth from minoritized racial-ethnic backgrounds, may be especially vulnerable to experiencing COVID-19-related distress. The current aims are to examine wheth...

Identifying factors that contribute to spatial thinking is of great interest given links between spatial thinking and success in STEM. Working memory has been found to be predictive of spatial thinking but little research has explored other components of executive function (i.e., inhibition, shifting) in relation to spatial thinking. A total of 131...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study of 11,880 youth incorporates a comprehensive range of measures assessing predictors and outcomes related to mental health across childhood and adolescence in participating youth, as well as information about family mental health history. We have previously described the logic and content of th...

Background The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ™ Study (ABCD StudyⓇ) is an open-science, multi-site, prospective, longitudinal study following over 11,800 9- and 10-year-old youth into early adulthood. The ABCD Study aims to prospectively examine the impact of substance use (SU) on neurocognitive and health outcomes. Although SU initiation t...

A full list of affiliations appears at the end of the paper. T he ABCD Study ® aims to characterize adolescent development and evaluate many influences that might shape developmental trajectories. While numerous factors are plausibly associated with neurodevelopment (for example, nutrition, sleep, exercise, head injuries and substance use), we have...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is the largest single-cohort prospective longitudinal study of neurodevelopment and children's health in the United States. A cohort of n= 11,880 children aged 9-10 years (and their parents/guardians) were recruited across 22 sites and are being followed with in-person visits on an annual basi...

Background Callous‐unemotional (CU) behaviors are important for identifying severe patterns of conduct problems (CP). One major fiber tract implicated in the development of CP is the uncinate fasciculus (UF), which connects amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The goals of the current study were to (a) explore differences in the white matter mi...

Given the negative trajectories of early behavior problems associated with ADHD, early diagnosis is considered critical to enable intervention and treatment. To this end, the current investigation employed machine learning to evaluate the relative predictive value of parent/teacher ratings, behavioral and neural measures of executive function (EF)...

Socioeconomic disadvantage is associated with larger COVID-19 disease burdens and pandemic-related economic impacts. We utilized the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to understand how family- and neighborhood-level socioeconomic disadvantage relate to disease burden, family communication, and preventative responses to the p...

The heated debate regarding bilingual cognitive advantages remains ongoing. While there are many studies supporting positive cognitive effects of bilingualism, recent meta-analyses have concluded that there is no consistent evidence for a ’bilingual advantage’. In this paper we focus on several theoretical concerns. First, we discuss changes in the...

Importance Incidental findings (IFs) are unexpected abnormalities discovered during imaging and can range from normal anatomic variants to findings requiring urgent medical intervention. In the case of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), reliable data about the prevalence and significance of IFs in the general population are limited, making it...

Aim To examine individual variability between perceived physical features and hormones of pubertal maturation in 9–10-year-old children as a function of sociodemographic characteristics. Methods Cross-sectional metrics of puberty were utilized from the baseline assessment of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study—a multi-site samp...

Hurricane Irma was the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in recorded history, displacing 6 million and killing over 120 people in the state of Florida alone. Unpredictable disasters like Irma are associated with poor cognitive and health outcomes that can disproportionately impact children. This study examined the effects of Hurricane Irma on the hi...

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulty learning and using language, and this difficulty cannot be attributed to other developmental conditions. The aim of the current study was to examine structural differences in dorsal and ventral language pathways between adolescents and young adults wi...

Speech articulation is supported by a number of perisylvian cortical and subcortical brain regions, and this network is structurally connected by several long association fiber pathways. One of these, the frontal aslant tract (FAT), connects the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and SMA and the inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis (IFGOp)....

It has been proposed that the maintenance of phonological information in verbal working memory (vWM) is carried by a domain-specific short-term storage center—the phonological loop—which is composed of a phonological store and an articulatory rehearsal system. Several brain regions including the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus (pIFG) and ante...

Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI) offers enormous promise for illuminating microstructural processes involved in brain development. Through the use of NODDI, our study examined myelination and synapse formation across typical (TD) and atypical brain development, and whether these microstructural properties predict executive...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is the largest single-cohort prospective longitudinal study of neurodevelopment and children's health in the United States. A cohort of n = 11,880 children aged 9-10 years (and their parents/guardians) were recruited across 22 sites and are being followed with in-person visits on an annual bas...

As natural disasters increase in frequency and severity (1,2), mounting evidence reveals that their human toll extends beyond death, injury, and loss. Posttraumatic stress (PTS) can be common among exposed individuals, and children are particularly vulnerable (3,4). Curiously, PTS can even be found among youth far removed from harm's way, and media...

Given the negative trajectories of early behavior problems associated with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), early diagnosis of ADHD is considered critical to enable early intervention and treatment. To this end, the current investigation employed machine learning to evaluate the relative predictive value of parent/teacher ratings, a...

Background Callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors are important for identifying severe patterns of conduct problems (CP). One major fiber tract implicated in the development of CP is the uncinate fasciculus (UF), which connects amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The goals of the current study were to 1) explore differences in the white matter mic...

Background The ability to dissociate axonal density in vivo from other microstructural properties of white matter is important for the diagnosis and treatment of neurologic disease, and new methods to do so are being developed. We investigated one such method–restricted diffusion imaging (RDI)–to see whether it can more accurately replicate histolo...

Objective: Disrupted reward processing is implicated in the etiology of disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs) and callous-unemotional traits. However, neuroimaging investigations of reward processing underlying these phenotypes remain sparse. The authors examined neural sensitivity in response to reward anticipation and receipt among youths with DB...

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to appropriately adjust behavior in a changing environment, has been challenging to operationalize and validate in cognitive neuroscience studies. Here, we investigate neural activation and directed functional connectivity underlying cognitive flexibility using an fMRI-adapted version of the Flexible Item Selectio...

Objective: This study utilized a multimodal approach to examine emotion dysregulation (ED) in young children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), ADHD + oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and typically developing (TD) children. Methods: We sought to explore if specific domains of ED (emotion regulation [ER], negativity/lability [...

The objective of this study is to evaluate support for three hypotheses about the etiology of adolescent-onset ADHD symptoms: (1) a “cool” cognitive load hypothesis, (2) a “hot” rewards processing hypothesis, and (3) a trauma exposure hypothesis. Participants (N = 50) were drawn from two public high schools in a culturally diverse metropolitan area...

Background Neurobiological differences linked to socioemotional and cognitive processing are well-documented in youth with disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs), especially youth with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. The current study expanded this literature by examining gray matter volume (GMV) differences among DBD youth with CU traits (DBDCU+),...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is an ongoing, nationwide study of the effects of environmental influences on behavioral and brain development in adolescents. The main objective of the study is to recruit and assess over eleven thousand 9-10-year-olds and follow them over the course of 10 years to characterize normative brai...

Learning a second language in childhood is inherently advantageous for communication. However, parents, educators and scientists have been interested in determining whether there are additional cognitive advantages. One of the most exciting yet controversial¹ findings about bilinguals is a reported advantage for executive function. That is, several...

The integrity of white matter architecture in the human brain is related to cognitive processing abilities. The corpus callosum is the largest white matter bundle interconnecting the two cerebral hemispheres. “Split-brain” patients in whom all cortical commissures have been severed to alleviate intractable epilepsy demonstrate remarkably intact cog...

The development of fluent reading is an extended process that requires the recruitment of a comprehensive system of perisylvian brain regions connected by an extensive network of fiber pathways. In the present cross-sectional study, we focused on fiber pathways—the arcuate fasciculus (AF), inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF), inferior fronto-occ...

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is an ongoing, nationwide study of the effects of environmental influences on behavioral and brain development in adolescents. The ABCD Study is a collaborative effort, including a Coordinating Center, 21 data acquisition sites across the United States, and a Data Analysis and Informatics Cent...

Restricted diffusion imaging (RDI) is a novel diffusion-weighted neuroimaging metric that is proposed to measure cellular and axonal density (Yeh et al, 2016). This metric has been shown to be sensitive to tumors and inflammation in rats, but it has never been tested in humans. Our study aimed to use this in vivo imaging method to replicate anterio...

We investigated the development of a recently identified white matter pathway, the frontal aslant tract (FAT) and its association with executive function and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 129 neurotypical male and female human children ranging in age from 7 months to 19 years. We found that the FAT could be tracked in 92% of those children...

In this article, we used High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) with advanced anatomically constrained particle filtering tractography to investigate the role of the arcuate fasciculus (AF) and the middle longitudinal fasciculus (MdLF) in speech perception in noise in younger and older adults. Fourteen young and 15 elderly adults complet...

In this review, we examine the structural connectivity of a recently-identified fiber pathway, the frontal aslant tract (FAT), and explore its function. We first review structural connectivity studies using tract-tracing methods in non-human primates, and diffusion-weighted imaging and electrostimulation in humans. These studies suggest a monosynap...

The frontal aslant tract (FAT) is a recently discovered, bilateral long association fiber pathway (Catani et al, 2012) in the frontal lobe that is thought to play an important role in verbal fluency and speech production (Dick, Bernal, & Tremblay, 2014). The FAT is most commonly thought to connect the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis and pa...

Learning a second language in childhood is inherently advantageous for communication. However, parents, educators, and scientists have been interested in determining whether there are additional cognitive advantages. One of the most exciting, yet controversial (1) findings about bilinguals is a reported advantage for executive function. That is, se...

Spatial researchers have been arguing over the optimum cognitive strategy for spatial problem-solving for several decades. The current article aims to shift this debate from strategy dichotomies to strategy flexibility—a cognitive process, which although alluded to in spatial research, presents practical methodological challenges to empirical testi...

The ABCD study is recruiting and following the brain development and health of over 10,000 9-10 year olds through adolescence. The imaging component of the study was developed by the ABCD Data Analysis and Informatics Center (DAIC) and the ABCD Imaging Acquisition Workgroup. Imaging methods and assessments were selected, optimized and harmonized ac...