Separable Brain Maturation Patterns Mediate Exposome Influences on Cognitive Development: A Longitudinal Study

Adolescent cognitive abilities develop within a complex exposomal landscape spanning multiple domains, yet the neural mechanisms through which such domains shape cognition remain poorly understood. Most prior studies have separately modeled longitudinal change in brain or cognition, and have sampled only narrow subsets of brain measures or exposome variables, limiting comprehensive longitudinal inference. Here, we examined whether brain maturation mediates the relationship between the exposome and general cognitive ability (g) in a large longitudinal cohort (N = 1,112; age 9-15), using 4,882 multimodal brain features and 112 exposome variables spanning six domains. We found that brain maturation patterns associated with g development showed moderate but consistent spatial correspondence with those associated with the exposome, with family environment domain showing the strongest correspondence. Mediation analyses identified distributed cortical and subcortical regions through which brain maturation links exposome variation to g development. Factor analysis of domain-level mediation patterns further revealed four latent factors, each associated with a largely distinct neural substrate, suggesting that different exposome domains influence g development through partially separable brain mechanisms. Together, these findings map brain maturation linking the exposome to adolescent cognitive development.