No effect of additional education on long-term brain structure, a preregistered natural experiment in thousands of individuals
Nicholas Judd; Rogier Kievit · 2025 · eLife
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
Abstract
Education is related to a wide variety of beneficial health, behavioral, and societal outcomes. However, whether education causes long-term structural changes in the brain remains unclear. A pressing challenge is that individuals self-select into continued education, thereby introducing a wide variety of environmental and genetic confounders. Fortunately, natural experiments allow us to isolate the causal impact of increased education from individual (and societal) characteristics. Here, we exploit a policy change in the UK (the 1972 ROSLA act) that increased the amount of mandatory schooling
Abstract by Nicholas Judd; Rogier Kievit, eLife (2025) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: DOAJ · DOI 10.7554/elife.101526