Case in Neuroimaging
Growing Up Together in Society: A 10-year longitudinal study on brain and behavior
The study Growing Up Together in Society (GUTS) is a collaboration of researchers from seven universities that want to understand how young people grow up in a complex society. The aim of the GUTS project is to investigate how young people’s brain and (social) behavior develop over a period of ten years. For this, patterns of neurobiological and behavioral development are connected to the circumstances someone grows up in: what access to educational opportunities, social networks and societal norms does someone have? And what makes some adolescents deviate from expected societal norms and engage in antisocial behavior?
The GUTS project investigates the role of self-regulation and its development specifically. In Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam University Medical Centra – location AMC), it uses structural and functional MRI along with behavioral experiments, in a longitudinal design. Our aim is to include 1000 adolescents from 10 to 20 years old. Over the next 10 years, functional and structural MRI data for the GUTS study will be acquired at the 3 Tesla MRI scanner at the Spinoza Centre of Neuroimaging due to its outstanding research facilities and support.