Enhancing Within-Person Estimation of Neurocognition and the Prediction of Externalizing Behaviors in Adolescents

Decades of research document an association between neurocognitive dysfunction and externalizing behaviors, including rule-breaking, aggression, and impulsivity. However, there has been very little work that examines how multiple neurocognitive functions co-occur within individuals and which combinations of neurocognitive functions are most relevant for externalizing behaviors. Moreover, Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), a widely used method for grouping individuals in person-centered analysis, often struggles to balance the tradeoff between good model fit (splitting participants into many latent profiles) and model interpretability (using only a few, highly distinct latent profiles). To address these problems, we implemented a non-parametric Bayesian form of LPA based on the Dirichlet process mixture model (DPM-LPA) and used it to study the relationship between neurocognitive functioning and externalizing behaviors in adolescents participating in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. First, we found that DPM-LPA outperformed conventional LPA, revealing more distinct profiles and classifying participants with higher certainty. Second, latent profiles extracted from DPM-LPA were differentially related to externalizing behaviors: profiles with deficits in working memory, inhibition, and/or language abilities were robustly related to different expressions of externalizing. Together, these findings represent a step towards addressing the challenge of finding novel ways to use neurocognitive data to better describe the individual. By precisely identifying and specifying the variation in neurocognitive and behavioral patterns this work offers an innovative empirical foundation for the development of assessments and interventions that address these costly behaviors.