Effects of socioeconomic status on brain development, and how cognitive neuroscience may contribute to leveling the playing field

Abstract

The study of socioeconomic status (SES) and the brain finds itself in a circumstance unusual for Cognitive Neuroscience: large numbers of questions with both practical and scientific importance exist, but they are currently under-researched and ripe for investigation. This review aims to highlight these questions, to outline their potential significance, and to suggest routes by which they might be approached. Although remarkably few neural studies have been carried out so far, there exists a large literature of previous behavioural work. This behavioural research provides an invaluable guide for future neuroimaging work, but also poses an important challenge for it: how can we ensure that the neural data contributes predictive or diagnostic power over and above what can be derived from behaviour alone? We discuss some of the open mechanistic questions which Cognitive Neuroscience may have the power to illuminate, spanning areas including language, numerical cognition, stress, memory, and social influences on learning. These questions have obvious practical and societal significance, but they also bear directly on a set of longstanding questions in basic science: what are the environmental and neural factors which affect the acquisition and retention of declarative and nondeclarative skills? Perhaps the best opportunity for practical and theoretical interests to converge is in the study of interventions. Many interventions aimed at improving the cognitive development of low SES children are currently underway, but almost all are operating without either input from, or study by, the Cognitive Neuroscience community. Given that longitudinal intervention studies are very hard to set up, but can, with proper designs, be ideal tests of causal mechanisms, this area promises exciting opportunities for future research.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Young Children: Predictors of Diagnostic Stability

“…During early childhood, adversity, parental socioeconomic status (SES), and enriched environments have been shown to shift risk for psychiatric and developmental disorders, including ADHD. [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] Predictors of ADHD stability among children diagnosed during preschool or kindergarten are poorly understood. In the studies available, children with persistent ADHD have higher psychiatric comorbidities, family history of psychopathology, and exposure to childhood adversity than children who no longer meet criteria for ADHD at followup.…”

How Socioeconomic Disadvantages Get Under the Skin and into the Brain to Influence Health Development Across the Lifespan

“…Among kindergarteners, neural activations during a phonological awareness task of discriminating rhymed monosyllabic words versus nonwords were assessed (Raizada and Kishiyama 2010). Phonological processing is a critical, underlying process in reading acquisition.…”

Effects of Emerging Alcohol and Marijuana Use Behaviors on Adolescents’ Neuropsychological Functioning Over Four Years

“…Early to late adolescence represents a crucial period for neuromaturation (Giedd, 2004), and age was associated with follow-up performance in all neuropsychological domains (ps < .05) and, therefore, was controlled for in all analyses. Some research suggests a correlation between performance on cognitive tests and SES (Raizada & Kishiyama, 2010;Roberts et al, 1999), so SES was included as a covariate. In this sample, SES was associated with verbal memory but not other domains (p < .05).…”