Mapping the Trajectory of Socioeconomic Disparity in Working Memory: Parental and Neighborhood Factors

Abstract

Working memory (WM) is positively correlated with socioeconomic status (SES). It is not clear, however, if SES predicts the rate of WM development over time nor whether SES effects are specific to family rather than neighborhood SES. A community sample of children (n = 316) enrolled between ages 10 and 13 completed four annual assessments of WM. Lower parental education, but not neighborhood disadvantage, was associated with worse WM performance. Neither measure of SES was associated with the rate of developmental change. Consequently the SES disparity in WM is not a developmental lag which narrows nor an accumulating effect that becomes more pronounced. Rather, the relation between family SES and WM originates earlier in childhood and is stable though adolescence.Working memory refers to the active, short-term maintenance and manipulation of information, generally in the service of guiding behavior, and is dependent on the prefrontal cortex (Baddeley, 2003;Best & Miller, 2010). Working memory becomes differentiated from single, overarching executive control processes by middle childhood and exhibits improvement through childhood and adolescence as the prefrontal cortex develops (Best & Miller, 2010; Lee, Bull, & Ho, in press). In the past decade the question of how social contexts, such as socioeconomic status, influence working memory performance and development has emerged as an increasing area of focus to explain individual differences in working memory development.This question also has considerable applied relevance. Working memory is a strong candidate mediator explaining the graded association between socioeconomic status (SES) and disparities in achievement, health and psychopathology (Adler et al., 1994;Bradley & Corwyn, 2002;Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997;Sirin, 2005 NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript function of holding and integrating information, that working memory plays a critical role in a wide array of cognitive abilities (Kimberg & Farah, 1993), mathematical skills (Alloway & Alloway, 2010;Bull, Espy, & Wiebe, 2008) and reading comprehension (Alloway & Alloway, 2010;Daneman & Merikle, 1996), and thus is an important foundational ability for cognitive development and achievement. Additionally, working memory has also been associated with depression (Snyder, 2013), health behaviors such as nutrition and physical activity (Riggs, Chou, Spruijt-Metz, & Pentz, 2010), alcohol use (Houben, Wiers, & Jansen, 2011) and sexual debut (Khurana et al., 2012). Consequently, working memory is a plausible mediator that may account, at least in part, for a wide-range of SES-related disparities.SES can be measured by various indices such as family income, parental education, and neighborhood characteristics (Krieger, Williams, & Moss, 1997). It is generally correlated with child and family stress and parenting behavior (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002;Conger & Donnellan, 2007;Evans, 2004), factors which would be expected to impact the development of neurocognitive systems inclu...

The limits of visual working memory in children: Exploring prioritization and recency effects with sequential presentation.

“…Allen, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2006, 2014. This extends limited previous work with children using different visual stimuli (Burnett Heyes et al, 2012;Hitch et al 1988;Pickering et al 1998) to the current task and stimulus sets.…”

“…This allows the separation of different mechanisms that contribute to visual WM. A robust finding from such analysis is a large recency effect for the final item in a list (Allen, Baddeley, & Hitch, 2006, 2014Gorgoraptis, Catalao, Bays, & Husain, 2011;Hu et al, 2014Hu et al, , 2016. Additionally, performance on the final item in a sequence is vulnerable to suffix interference (where a to-be-ignored item drawn from the stimulus set is briefly presented following the final item in a sequence), yet is largely unaffected by cognitive load Hu et al, 2014Hu et al, , 2016.…”

Working memory mediates the effects of gestational age at birth on expressive language development in children.

“…Regarding the environmental factors, our data showed that SES and HLE are directly associated with language, replicating previous findings (Farah et al, 2006;Hackman & Farah, 2009;Hart & Risley, 1992;Hoff & Tian, 2005;McKean et al, 2015;Noble et al, 2007;Roberts et al, 2005;Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2014;Wood, 2002). Moreover, consistently with the literature across kindergartners, first graders, and preadolescents (Evans & Schamberg, 2009;Farah et al, 2006;Hackman et al, 2014;Sarsour et al, 2011;Waber et al, 2007), disadvantaged SES was related to impaired temporary memory.…”

“…For example, SES in children attending primary school accounted for 5.5% of the variance in vWM (Noble et al, 2007). Similar correlations between SES and vWM have been shown in middle childhood (Sarsour et al, 2011) and in adolescence (Hackman et al, 2014;Waber et al, 2007), suggesting enduring effects.…”

“…Verbal temporary memory was found impaired in preterm individuals in a longitudinal cohort of 919 adults from the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study, supporting memory as a target of direct effects of prematurity and suggesting that such effects may have long-lasting consequences (Heinonen et al, 2015). Robust associations have also been found between both SES and HLE, and temporary memory (Evans & Schamberg, 2009;Farah et al, 2006;Hackman et al, 2014;Noble et al, 2007;Peterson, et al, 2013;Sarsour et al, 2011). For example, SES in children attending primary school accounted for 5.5% of the variance in vWM (Noble et al, 2007).…”