Another valuable collaborator to ABCD, the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR), brings to the study a crucial and timely focus on several environmental and behavioral factors that affect growth and development, including sleep patterns, physical activity, screen time, exposure to stressful events, and social support systems and networks. These are pressing questions for parents concerned with the health, including brain health, of their teenage children. Assessing these environmental and behavioral factors along with neurodevelopmental processes will improve our understanding of how these various experiences shape brain function and development. Importantly, the ABCD study will also be able to evaluate how well self-reported measures of substance use and risk-taking attitudes correlate with imaging and biological measures over time, a significant contribution to the field of behavioral science.
