Effects of socioeconomic status on brain development, and how cognitive neuroscience may contribute to leveling the playing field
Open Access
- 1 January 2010
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
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.Keywords
This publication has 84 references indexed in Scilit:
- Early parental care is important for hippocampal maturation: Evidence from brain morphology in humansNeuroImage, 2010
- Quantifying the Adequacy of Neural Representations for a Cross-Language Phonetic Discrimination Task: Prediction of Individual DifferencesCerebral Cortex, 2009
- Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memoryProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009
- Socioeconomic status and the developing brainTrends in Cognitive Sciences, 2009
- Use it or lose it? SES mitigates age-related decline in a recency/recognition taskNeurobiology of Aging, 2008
- Socioeconomic status predicts hemispheric specialisation of the left inferior frontal gyrus in young childrenNeuroImage, 2008
- Frontal and Limbic Activation During Inhibitory Control Predicts Treatment Response in Major Depressive DisorderBiological Psychiatry, 2007
- Neuroplasticity Mediated by Altered Gene ExpressionNeuropsychopharmacology, 2007
- Developmental potential in the first 5 years for children in developing countriesThe Lancet, 2007
- Economic, neurobiological, and behavioral perspectives on building America’s future workforceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2006