TY - JOUR
T1 - Cognitive tutoring induces widespread neuroplasticity and remediates brain function in children with mathematical learning disabilities
AU - Iuculano, Teresa
AU - Rosenberg-Lee, Miriam
AU - Richardson, Jennifer
AU - Tenison, Caitlin
AU - Fuchs, Lynn
AU - Supekar, Kaustubh
AU - Menon, Vinod
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by NIH grants (HD047520, HD059205, HD057610 to VM; MH101394 to MRL; and HD053714 to LF). We thank Drs Daniel Abrams, Christian Battista, and Tanya Evans for useful feedback.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/9/30
Y1 - 2015/9/30
N2 - Competency with numbers is essential in today's society; yet, up to 20% of children exhibit moderate to severe mathematical learning disabilities (MLD). Behavioural intervention can be effective, but the neurobiological mechanisms underlying successful intervention are unknown. Here we demonstrate that eight weeks of 1:1 cognitive tutoring not only remediates poor performance in children with MLD, but also induces widespread changes in brain activity. Neuroplasticity manifests as normalization of aberrant functional responses in a distributed network of parietal, prefrontal and ventral temporal-occipital areas that support successful numerical problem solving, and is correlated with performance gains. Remarkably, machine learning algorithms show that brain activity patterns in children with MLD are significantly discriminable from neurotypical peers before, but not after, tutoring, suggesting that behavioural gains are not due to compensatory mechanisms. Our study identifies functional brain mechanisms underlying effective intervention in children with MLD and provides novel metrics for assessing response to intervention.
AB - Competency with numbers is essential in today's society; yet, up to 20% of children exhibit moderate to severe mathematical learning disabilities (MLD). Behavioural intervention can be effective, but the neurobiological mechanisms underlying successful intervention are unknown. Here we demonstrate that eight weeks of 1:1 cognitive tutoring not only remediates poor performance in children with MLD, but also induces widespread changes in brain activity. Neuroplasticity manifests as normalization of aberrant functional responses in a distributed network of parietal, prefrontal and ventral temporal-occipital areas that support successful numerical problem solving, and is correlated with performance gains. Remarkably, machine learning algorithms show that brain activity patterns in children with MLD are significantly discriminable from neurotypical peers before, but not after, tutoring, suggesting that behavioural gains are not due to compensatory mechanisms. Our study identifies functional brain mechanisms underlying effective intervention in children with MLD and provides novel metrics for assessing response to intervention.
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U2 - 10.1038/ncomms9453
DO - 10.1038/ncomms9453
M3 - Article
C2 - 26419418
AN - SCOPUS:84943151933
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 6
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
M1 - 8453
ER -