This application is in response to NOT-OD-10-032: NIH Announces the Availability of Recovery Act Funds for Competitive Revision Applications through the NIH Basic Behavioral and Social Science Opportunity Network (OppNet). The proposed project will further our understanding of the neurocognitive processes underlying the effects of social, family and parenting context on children's developing effortful control, which in turn, will increase our understanding of children's vulnerability or resilience to the experience of low-income or poverty in early childhood. Low income or poverty is related to lower effortful control, which is critical to the development of adaptive functioning. However, little is known about how sociodemographic risk might impact the development of effortful control in this early developmental period. The funded parent study is examining the development of effortful control in a community sample of 347 3-year-old children, 1/3 in families at or near the poverty threshold, 1/3 in lower-income families, and 1/3 in middle- to upper-income families. In the parent project, children are assessed 4 times across 2.5 years. Assessments include neuropsychological assessment of effortful control, physiological assessment of stress reactivity, and measures of parenting, family disruptions, and children's social-emotional adjustment. However, the effects of low income on young children's developing prefrontal cortex (PFC) are not well understood. This supplement to the parent grant would allow us to directly assess PFC activity using EEG/ERP to understand how underlying neural processes might be shaped by the social context associated with low income and poverty. In particular, we will be able to clarify what aspects of young children's effortful control are shaped by the experience of disadvantage. In this study, EEG/ERP assessments will extend the scope of the ongoing study to address basic neurocognitive processes underlying behavior. EEG/ERP assessments will be conducted with a randomly selected subset of the larger sample, with equal numbers of children sampled from each income category and across gender. These assessments will occur at the 3rd of 4 assessment time points allowing the examination of income, family disruptions, parenting and physiological stress responses as predictors of differences in activity in the PFC, which in turn, might predict children's performance on neuropsychological effortful control measures, social-emotional adjustment and school readiness.
Findings from this study will potentially elucidate the underlying neural processes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) that are shaped by experiences associated with low income and poverty, clarify observed differences or lack of them on neuropsychological measures of effortful control, and determine the extent to which activity in the PFC plays a role in young children's social-emotional adjustment and school readiness.
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