Poster #33 - Socioeconomic Disparities in Children’s Cognitive Performance: Deficits or Differences?

• In Event: Poster Session 18

Abstract

Children’s socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with cognitive outcomes and academic success (Bradley and Corwyn, 2002; Letourneau et al. 2011). SES is also related to brain structure and function (Noble & Giebler, 2020). Indeed, psychological and neural measures themselves are related, and some cognitive disparities have been accounted for by brain characteristics (e.g., mediation analysis of Noble et al., 2015). This invites a natural, if simplistic, inference: Higher SES children are more generously endowed with cognitive and brain resources than lower SES children. In other words, low SES children have a deficit in these resources compared with higher SES children.

Here we explore evidence suggesting different, not deficient, cognitive and brain processes in lower SES children. This line of research suggests qualitative rather than quantitative differences related to SES, with higher and lower SES children achieving their cognitive performance by different types of underlying neural activity (Demir et al., 2015). In other words, SES moderates the brain-cognition relationship. We searched and summarized empirical studies finding moderation effects of SES on the brain-behavior association in typically developing children and adolescents, with a focus on their cognitive abilities.

We followed PRISMA guidelines to search PUBMED with keywords related to socioeconomic status, neuroscience methods, participants’ age, and statistical moderating effects. A total of 1314 articles were identified, with 32 duplications. After screening the titles and/or abstract, 29 went through full-text review, and 16 met the inclusion criteria. Two more papers were identified by hand-searching of gray literature sources, resulting in 18 in the final review (details in Figure 1). Note that we were not able to assess how commonly cognition-brain relations are moderated by SES. Our goal is to identify a set of studies that provide “existence proofs” of higher and lower SES recruiting the brain differently, even when cognitive performance is co-varied or equated.

Significant moderating effects of SES were found for language learning, selective attention, executive attention, reasoning, and mathematics, and their relations to brain processes (See Table 1 for a summary). Three broad categories of SES moderation were found. The first contains studies using performance-matched participants and showing a significant moderation of SES on the cognition-brain association. This can involve cognition-brain correlations in different brain regions for higher-and lower-SES children, suggesting the neural systems supporting better performance may vary by participants’ SES. Additionally, regions may not differ but brain-performance correlations may be opposite in sign for higher and lower SES. A weaker, but still relevant, pattern of results is SES differences in neural patterns without observed group differences in performance. A third pattern is higher SES participants performing better but showing an attenuated brain-behavior association compared to lower-SES children, possibly reflecting buffering of the neurobiological risks by socioeconomic advantage.

Our review consolidates preliminary evidence of qualitative differences in the brain-cognition association across levels of SES, revealed by at least some studies. We used neuroscience as evidence for characterizing some SES disparities as differences rather than deficits. This in turn highlights the importance of socioeconomically diverse populations in developmental studies.

Authors

• Lingyan Hu, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Martha J Farah, University of Pennsylvania