Adolescent brain cognitive development (ABCD) study: Overview of substance use assessment methods.

One of the objectives of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study (https://abcdstudy.org/) is to establish a national longitudinal cohort of 9 and 10 year olds that will be followed for 10 years in order to prospectively study the risk and protective factors influencing substance use and its consequences, examine the impact of substance use on neurocognitive, health and psychosocial outcomes, and to understand the relationship between substance use and psychopathology. This article provides an overview of the ABCD Study Substance Use Workgroup, provides the goals for the workgroup, rationale for the substance use battery, and includes details on the substance use module methods and measurement tools used during baseline, 6-month and 1-year follow-up assessment time-points. Prospective, longitudinal assessment of these substance use domains over a period of ten years in a nationwide sample of youth presents an unprecedented opportunity to further understand the timing and interactive relationships between substance use and neurocognitive, health, and psychopathology outcomes in youth living in the United States

The structure of cognition in 9 and 10 year-old children and associations with problem behaviors: Findings from the ABCD study\u27s baseline neurocognitive battery

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is poised to be the largest single-cohort long-term longitudinal study of neurodevelopment and child health in the United States. Baseline data on N= 4521 children aged 9-10 were released for public access on November 2, 2018. In this paper we performed principal component analyses of the neurocognitive assessments administered to the baseline sample. The neurocognitive battery included seven measures from the NIH Toolbox as well as five other tasks. We implemented a Bayesian Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis (BPPCA) model that incorporated nesting of subjects within families and within data collection sites. We extracted varimax-rotated component scores from a three-component model and associated these scores with parent-rated Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) internalizing, externalizing, and stress reactivity. We found evidence for three broad components that encompass general cognitive ability, executive function, and learning/memory. These were significantly associated with CBCL scores in a differential manner but with small effect sizes. These findings set the stage for longitudinal analysis of neurocognitive and psychopathological data from the ABCD cohort as they age into the period of maximal adolescent risk-taking

How Should Addiction-Related Research at the National Institutes of Health be Reorganized?

The decades-old debate about the optimum organizational structure of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has reached a crescendo with the recent deliberations of the Scientific Management Review Board, which, despite the lack of a crisis, proposed a structural reorganization that would dissolve the two institutes and create a new institute for substance use, abuse, and addiction, in hope of new scientific and public health advances (Collins, 2010). For a new institute to succeed, a multitude of potential challenges need to be negotiated effectivel

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Environmental cues and associative learning.

The proposed model is based on the principles of classical conditioning and as such focuses on the importance of spatial or temporal contiguity of contextual cues and list or task items and the reliability of these cues as predictors of list items as the foundation for the establishment of context-item associations and the resultant "context-effect."Recent literature has indicated that subjects who acquire information and are then tested for recall in the environmental context of original learning typically produce higher recall scores than those subjects who test in a new or different context. The current study includes a test of a model which is designed to predict and explain why the facilitation in same-context testing should occur and also when and why it should not occur.Data from Experiment 2, in which a 2-choice recognition test was used on the criterion task, did not yield the predicted interaction of acquisition and test room context on either the proportion of hits, correct rejections, false positives and misses or the reaction time data on these measures. Rather, the data indicated that subjects who engaged in the recognition test in an "enriched" environment performed substantially better than those who tested in a "deprived" environment. Potential reasons for these findings as well as a discussion of the implications and extensions of the model are also provided.Two studies were conducted utilizing the paired-associate paradigm and testing the effects of environmental context manipulations on response integration (Experiment 1) and response selection (Experiment 2). The findings of Experiment 1 in which poorer performance was predicted for same context subjects indicated that moderate degree of learning (DOL) subjects (8/16 response elicitations regardless of correctness) were more affected by contextual manipulations than either low (4/16) or high DOL (16/16) subjects. The predicted interaction of DOL and test room context on the elicitation of response "parts" in same-context conditions was demonstrated most clearly in an increased number of inversions and decreased number of omissions in the cued-recall of CCC trigrams for the moderate DOL group