Poster #35 - Socioeconomic Disparity in Prefrontal Development During Early Childhood

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Cognitive Process

Integrative Statement

Socioeconomic status (SES) exerts strong influences on cognitive development. Children from low SES backgrounds show poor executive function (EF), which is a major risk factor for poor academic and social functioning later in life. Executive function is strongly dependent on lateral prefrontal cortex, but no previous study has examined if low SES impairs the functional development of lateral prefrontal cortex. The present study examined whether the SES of preschool children is associated with prefrontal activation during EF tasks. Ninety three preschool children participated in this study (mean age = 59.8 months, SD = 10.5). We were interested in whether children in low-SES families show different behavioral and neurological responses as compared to children in high-SES families, and we classified children into poverty and no-poverty groups according to a criterion of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Nineteen children were categorized into poverty group and 74 children into no-poverty group. Children were given Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) tasks from the NIH toolbox. The brain activation during the tasks was assessed using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) (OEG-16, Spectratech, Japan). The region of interest was located near F3/4 and F7/8 (the lateral prefrontal regions, channels 2, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14) of the International 10/20 system. We examined whether poverty was correlated with performances of the DCCS tasks. The results revealed that poverty was not significantly correlated with the proportion of successful switches (Spearman's rho, r = .002 p = .985). Next, we investigated whether lateral prefrontal regions were activated during the DCCS tasks. The difference in oxy-Hb change between the rest phases and the task phases for each channel was tested using a paired two-tailed Student’s t test. The children exhibited significantly greater activation of the right (channels 2, 4, and 5) and left (channels 13 and 14) prefrontal regions during the task phases compared with the rest phases (Student’s t test, p < .008). Then, we conducted a MANCOVA with the difference between the task phases and the rest phases in each channel (channels 2, 4, 5, 13, 14) as the dependent variable and poverty (poverty vs. no-poverty group) as the independent variable. The results revealed that poverty had a significant effect for channel 2 [F (1, 91) = 5.605, p = .020, η2 = .058] and 5 [F (1, 91) = 4.783, p = .031, η2 = .050] (Figure 1). Our findings successfully highlight the influence of SES on executive control processing that the behavioral test could not show, and suggest that environmental conditions (and perhaps less learning opportunities) can impair children’s brain activation.

Authors

• Chifumi Sakata, Kyoto University
  Presenting Author

• Ikuko Shinohara, National Institute for Educational Policy Research of Japan
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yusuke Moriguchi, Kyoto University
  Non-Presenting Author