Global and regional white matter development in early childhood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract White matter development continues throughout childhood and into early adulthood, but few studies have examined early childhood, and the specific trajectories and regional variation in this age range remain unclear. The aim of this study was to characterize developmental trajectories and sex differences of white matter in typically developing young children. Three hundred and ninety-six diffusion tensor imaging datasets from 120 children (57 male) aged 2-8 years were analyzed using tractography. Fractional anisotropy (FA) increased and mean diffusivity (MD) decreased in all white matter tracts by 5-15% over the 6-year period, likely reflecting increases in myelination and axonal packing. Males showed steeper slopes in a number of brain areas. Overall, early childhood is associated with substantial development of all white matter and appears to be an important period for the development of occipital and limbic connections, which showed the largest changes. This study provides a detailed characterization of age-related white matter changes in early childhood, offering baseline data that can be used to understand cognitive and behavioural development, as well as to identify deviations from normal development in children with various diseases, disorders, or brain injuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".