corticalreading

Heritable and Experience-Dependent Cortical Traits of Reading Ability

Author: Mikael Roll Institution: Lund University Date: 2025-10-27 Repository: corticalreading

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Overview

This repository contains code and analysis scripts for the study “Heritable and experience-dependent cortical traits of reading ability.” The project analyzes cortical myelination, thickness, and area in relation to reading ability using structural MRI and behavioral data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) Young Adult dataset.

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Contents

/scripts/                # Bash and R scripts for data extraction and analysis
/docs/                   # Text documentation of the full pipeline
  └── Full_pipeline_description.txt
LICENSE
README.md

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Data Availability

• MRI and behavioral data: Available through the Human Connectome Project (HCP) database (S1200 release). Access requires acceptance of the HCP Data Use Terms: https://db.humanconnectome.org/

• Derived data: Not redistributed here to comply with HCP data use restrictions. However, all scripts and commands needed to reproduce the results from raw HCP data are provided in this repository.

• Genetic data: Restricted HCP variables were used for the twin modeling analyses. Researchers with approved access to these data can reproduce the genetic modeling steps using the provided scripts.

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Code Description

MRI data processing

All cortical metrics were extracted in the fs_LR 32k surface space using the Conte69 atlas and the HCP-MMP1.0 (Glasser et al., 2016) parcellation. Surface-based analyses were implemented with Connectome Workbench (wb_command) as detailed in docs/Full_pipeline_description.txt.

Statistical analysis

All analyses were performed in R 4.4.3 (macOS 26.0.1). The main models include:

• Linear regressions predicting oral reading scores
• Quantile regressions for robustness
• Bivariate ACE models using the umx package for heritability and genetic correlation estimates

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How to Reproduce the Analyses

1. Obtain access to the HCP Young Adult S1200 dataset.
2. Download the required structural and behavioral files as specified in the pipeline text file.
3. Run the provided Bash code to extract cortical measures.
4. Load the resulting .txt matrices into R and execute the analysis code.

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Citation

If you use this code, please cite:

Roll, M. (accepted). Heritable and experience-dependent cortical traits of reading ability. Cerebral Cortex.

If you use the data pipelines or derived measures, please also acknowledge the Human Connectome Project (HCP) as described here: HCP Citation Guidelines

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License

This code is released under the MIT License. Use of HCP data must comply with the Human Connectome Project Data Use Terms.