Longitudinal Associations Between Social Media And Cortical Morphology
Claire Tsai (she/her) (2027) | Cognitive Science and Neuroscience
Claire Tsai is a SURF L&S scholarship recipient and a member of the Class of 2027 double majoring in Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. For her SURF project this summer, she is investigating how social media use is associated with changes in adolescent brain development over time. Using MRI data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, Claire examines how varying levels of social media use may influence changes in brain structure, with the goal of informing healthier social media practices and future research on adolescent brain development.
What made you choose this research project? How did your interest in your research topic emerge?
Before starting this research project, I worked at the Nagata Lab at UCSF, where I was first exposed to research on how social media affects adolescence in both behavioral and neurological contexts. Seeing emerging evidence on how higher social media usage is linked to altered cortical thickness made me curious about how these platforms interact with the developing brain. Specifically, I became interested in cortical morphology changes that occur in an adolescent’s brain during development, how regions like the prefrontal, temporal, and visual cortices typically mature, and how heavy social media use might accelerate, delay, or otherwise alter that trajectory. As social media usage has become nearly ubiquitous, I was fascinated by the opportunity to research its potential longitudinal effects.
What is your project about (in simple terms)? How does it relate to issues or ideas you have been studying in your coursework?
My project looks at how social media usage is associated with longitudinal changes in brain cortical morphology in adolescents. This project leverages consistent repeated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data and social media-use measures from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study and will examine how varying levels of social media usage relate to changes in brain structure in adolescents, informing future healthy usage behaviors and targets for future prevention efforts. This work connects directly to what I study in my Cognitive Science and Neuroscience courses, where we discuss how cortical regions support cognition, emotion regulation, and reward, and how experiences in adolescence can reshape neural circuits.
What are you most excited about this summer? Will your research entail travel, access to special collections, or experiments?
I’m most excited about getting to work with people from different disciplines in the SURF cohort while simultaneously conducting my own research. I will be working at UCSF Mission Bay and will gain access to the large-scale ABCD dataset, which includes thousands of adolescents followed over many years with MRI and rich behavioral measures.
What do you hope to learn from this experience? What would success look like for you? What challenges do you anticipate confronting?
I hope to deepen my analytical research skills, particularly in analyzing longitudinal data, such as modeling cortical thickness trajectories, compared to my past experience with more cross-sectional studies. Success to me would mean completing a rigorous analysis that yields quantifiable results while also gaining enough independence to design future research beyond this summer. I anticipate several challenges with working with complex MRI data and separating the effects from other factors, including sleep, other forms of digital media, and physical activity.
What do you hope comes out of this research? What impact do you hope your research will have?
Ultimately, I hope that my research can inform our understanding of how social media can be harmful for adolescents’ brain development, which can inform more nuanced guidelines for social media. I also hope that this work can support parents, educators, and clinicians in making evidence-based judgments on social media and motivate future longitudinal studies on adolescent brain development.