PROJECT SUMMARY The overall objective of the current project is to determine how brain systems are altered in children and youth who are experiencing difficulties in each of reading and math specifically. Recent research suggests that control processes that aid in goal-oriented behaviors and task performance, known as executive function, are often altered in children and youth who are having reading and/or math difficulties. Specific regions of the brain, mainly in the prefrontal cortex, play a prominent role in executive function. These executive regions act by altering or modulating activity in other brain regions, consistent with their role in control processes. Yet prior studies have mainly focused on brain regions more specifically involved in reading and math rather than regions involved in executive processes. The first main aim of the proposed project will examine how connectivity between these prefrontal brain regions and areas of the brain that are important for each of these domains — left temporo- parietal regions with regards to reading, and the right intraparietal sulcus with regards to math — may be altered in individuals with reading and math difficulties, respectively. To do so, 160 individuals aged 10-16 who are likely to have reading and/or math difficulties will undergo functional neuroimaging while they perform three types of tasks – a reading task, a math task, and an executive control task. These data will be combined with a previously collected sample of approximately the same size who performed the same neuroimaging tasks, but who are more typically developing. Whether patterns of connectivity from prefrontal areas across each of the three tasks differ in those who have reading difficulties as compared to those who do not will be determined, with parallel analyses performed for those who have math difficulties versus those who do not. Of interest will be the degree to which disrupted connectivity is similar or distinct in individuals with reading difficulties as compared to those with math difficulties. A second main aim is to test the hypothesis that such connectivity is influenced by an individual’s level of reading and/or math anxiety. Not much is known about the neural underpinnings of these academically-related aspects of anxiety. In addition, this aim will also examine how these aspects of anxiety influence connectivity from prefrontal executive regions to brain regions involved in emotional processing. Finally, the third aim of this project will take a novel computational approach of graphing the brain network during each task and while participants are at rest. These networks will be computationally “lesioned” by iteratively removing nodes to determine how the overall functioning of the network is altered by such removal. This approach will isolate those regions that most critically distinguish individuals with and without reading difficulties and likewise with or without math difficulties. The results of this pro...