Beginning as early as preschool, and persisting throughout childhood and beyond, individuals of low SES perform below their middle class counterparts on a variety of psychometric tests. The cognitive disparities between poor and middle class children are robust, persistent over time, and have consequences for future life success. The research proposed here seeks to characterize the nature of the disparity in terms of the underlying systems of the mind and brain affected by poverty. Additional goals are to understand the relation of these underlying effects to both antecedent early life experiences and resultant future life trajectories. Specifically, the theoretical framework and methods of Cognitive Neuroscience will be used to address several basic questions about the relation between poverty and cognitive. First and foremost: What underlying systems of the developing mind and brain are impacted by poverty? This project will partition the known cognitive disparities, previously assessed with the relatively complex tasks of standardized psychological assessment, into 5 key neurocognitive systems: Parietal/spatial, Occipito-temporal/pattern vision, Temporal/memory, and Fronto-temporal/language, and Prefrontal/executive, with further analysis of the latter into working memory, reward processing, and conflict monitoring. This will be accomplished with behavioral testing and functional neuroimaging of a cohort of carefully screened middle school-aged low SES children and a middle SES comparison group. Subsequently, the results of the neurocognitive analysis will be used in the search for causal mechanisms, drawing upon a rich database of information about the life experiences of the low SES children. Neurocognitive systems mediating resilience and successful adolescence will also be sought. Finally, the same set of neurocognitive systems will be assessed in a younger sample of low SES children, at age 5, when developmental disparities can consist of presence versus absence of ability, rather than degrees of proficiency, and when the foundations of school performance are being laid. ? ?
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