Early experience and neurocognitive development: Socio-economic variables.

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Early Experience and Neurocognitive Development: Socioeconomic Variables Abstract With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Farah will conduct a one-year study attempting to begin to characterize the cognitive outcomes of childhood poverty in terms of the framework of Cognitive Neuroscience. Dr. Farah aims to partition the known cognitive disparities, previously assessed with the relatively blunt instruments of IQ tests and school achievement measures, into 7 key neurocognitive systems using selective behaviorally-based neurocognitive tasks. These tasks are as follows: Dorsolateral prefrontal/working memory, Ventromedial prefrontal /reward processing, Anterior cingulate/conflict monitoring, Parietal/spatial, Occipito-temporal/pattern vision, Temporal/memory, and Fronto-temporal/language. This partitioning may isolate the neurocognitive system or systems that are most sensitive to the effects of experiential factors related to socio-economic-status (SES). If such systems can be delineated, then researchers may be in a position to discover the potentially causal factors in the family and home environment, from a wide array of factors previously measured with the low SES participants, from somatic factors such as lead levels to psychological factors such as parental depression and stress. The primary goal of this proposal is to address the question: Given that SES has been shown to affect cognitive development, what underlying systems of the developing mind and brain are impacted by the complex bundle of experiential factors that constitute SES? Brain development involves a complex interplay between innate and experiential factors. Our understanding of the role of experience comes from animal and human evidence. Experimental manipulation of the environment of young animals has demonstrated profound effects of environmental stimulation and the presence of stressors on brain health. Studies of children raised under conditions of extreme deprivation, such as Romanian orphanages, have found measurable differences in brain development. What has not been established is the effect of differences in early experience within the normal range for our society. One dimension on which normal children's experience may differ is related to their family's socioeconomic status (SES). Furthermore, SES is known to impact a wide range of measures of cognitive development, from IQ tests to school achievement. The present project begins with the assumption that these SES disparities in cognitive development are not to be explained in terms of innate differences between families, but are instead due to some of the many experiential differences that correlate with SES.