When little brain goes to school: Impact of pedagogy on cerebellar peduncles' development

The cerebellum plays a central role in motor coordination, cognition, and learning, yet its developmental sensitivity to students' everyday learning environments remains poorly understood. Here, we examined whether schooling context is associated with differences in the developmental trajectories of cerebellar white matter pathways. Using multi-shell diffusion-weighted Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we quantified microstructural properties of the inferior (ICP), middle (MCP), and superior cerebellar peduncles (SCP) in 88 typically developing students aged 4-16 years, including a longitudinal subsample of 34 participants reassessed after approximately three years. Across tracts, higher intra-cellular volume fraction (ICVF) and lower mean diffusivity (MD) were associated with better fluid intelligence, selective attention, and working memory, indicating functional relevance of cerebellar microstructure for cognitive development. Age was a strong predictor of MD and ICVF across all cerebellar peduncles, consistent with ongoing maturation throughout childhood and adolescence. Crucially, significant ageXschooling interactions emerged for fractional anisotropy (FA) within the ICP and SCP, suggesting that the pace of cerebellar white matter maturation differs as a function of school experience. Longitudinal analyses provided convergent, trend-level support for these patterns, with traditionally schooled students showing numerically larger microstructural change in the right ICP (MD) and left ICP and SCP (FA). Classification analyses yielded modest discrimination between schooling contexts, indicating that cerebellar microstructure alone does not robustly encode educational background. Together, these findings provide evidence that cerebellar white matter development follows experience-sensitive trajectories, highlighting schooling as a meaningful environmental factor contributing to individual variability in neurodevelopment.