3-078 - New approaches to understanding SES differences in neurocognitive development across the lifespan

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Parental socioeconomic status (SES) affects neurocognitive development. However, little is known about the mechanisms of transmission or how these change over development. This symposium discusses SES effects on cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying neurocognitive development, and identifies novel approaches to characterize SES effects across the lifespan.

Paper1, using eye-tracking, reports SES differences in communicative ability at 6-months and its relationship to language outcomes at 2-years, highlighting early SES’s cascading effects on later development. Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging, Paper2 shows that relationships between white matter connectivity and reading skill vary across SES in school-aged children. Highly-skilled lower-SES readers show stronger connectivity in tracts that support orthographic and visuospatial processing, suggesting increased reliance on larger-unit orthographic strategies as compared to highly-skilled higher-SES readers. Thus, SES differences might lead to processing strategy adaptations as children face increasingly complex tasks. Finally, Paper3 shows that cerebral-blood-flow decline in prefrontal cortex over adulthood is moderated by parental SES, with decline being greater for lower-SES adults, suggesting early higher-SES might possess far-reaching, protective effects.

First, the symposium contributes to the literature by presenting methods (eye-tracking, DTI and CBF) that can be measured similarly across development to study longitudinal and long-lasting SES effects. Second, it moves beyond a static conceptualization of SES, and explores its dynamic nature (longitudinal effects, interaction with age and skill). Third, it presents measures of network or functional infrastructure for brain function rather than localized and task-specific measures.

This discussion might benefit development of targeted interventions to remediate SES differences over development.

Sub Unit

• Biological Processes

Chair

• Ozlem Ece Demir, Northwestern University

Discussant

• Nathan A Fox, Univ of Maryland

Individual Presentations

• Early predictors of language development in infants from low-SES families: a multi-ethnic eye-tracking study in the community - Presenting Author: Przemyslaw Tomalski, Warsaw University; Haiko Ballieux, University of East London; Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Birkbeck College; Mark H Johnson, Birkbeck College; Elena Kushnerenko, University of East London; Derek Graham Moore, University of East London

• Socioeconomic status may drive divergent reading skill-coherence relationships in right visuospatial tracts - Presenting Author: Margaret M Gullick, University of Texas at Austin; Ozlem Ece Demir, Northwestern University; James R Booth, University of Texas -Austin

• Higher parental education may protect against age-related decline of regional cerebral blood flow in the prefrontal cortex - Presenting Author: Daniel A Hackman, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Peter J. Gianaros, Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh; Dora H Kuan, University of Pittsburgh; Stephen Bennett Manuck, University of Pittsburgh