Multimodal data revealed different biological substrates underlying intelligence for young males and females

Individual differences in intelligence are usually measured using psychometric tests, which cover multifaceted cognitive domains and are strongly predictive of various life outcomes. Here, we employed connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM) to estimate individual’s IQ scores using either cortical thickness in grey matter or resting-state functional connectivity within fully cross-validations for males and females separately. Importantly, integrating multimodal neuroimaging data using CPM achieved improved prediction performance. Interestingly, we found that males and females use distinctively structured brains to achieve similar level of intelligence, consistent with their superiority in cognitive behavior domains (visuospatial processing and logical thinking vs. verbal and memory ability).