Early experience and neurocognitive development: Socio-economic variables.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，法拉博士将进行一项为期一年的研究，试图开始在认知神经科学的框架内描述儿童贫困的认知结果。 法拉博士的目标是使用选择性的基于行为的神经认知任务，将已知的认知差异划分为7个关键的神经认知系统，这些认知差异以前是用相对生硬的智商测试和学校成绩测量工具评估的。 这些任务如下：背外侧前额叶/工作记忆、腹内侧前额叶/奖赏处理、前扣带回/冲突监控、顶叶/空间、枕颞/模式视觉、时间/记忆和额颞/语言。 这种划分可能会隔离神经认知系统或对与社会经济地位（SES）相关的经验因素的影响最敏感的系统。 如果这些系统能够被描绘出来，那么研究人员就能够从以前对低SES参与者测量的一系列因素中发现家庭和家庭环境中的潜在因果因素，从身体因素（如铅水平）到心理因素（如父母抑郁和压力）。鉴于SES已被证明会影响认知发展，那么构成SES的复杂经验因素会影响发育中的心智和大脑的哪些潜在系统？ 大脑发育涉及先天因素和经验因素之间复杂的相互作用。 我们对经验作用的理解来自动物和人类的证据。对年轻动物环境的实验操作已经证明了环境刺激和压力源的存在对大脑健康的深远影响。 对在极端贫困条件下（如罗马尼亚孤儿院）长大的儿童进行的研究发现，他们的大脑发育存在明显差异。 我们尚未确定的是，在我们社会的正常范围内，早期经验的差异会产生什么影响。 正常儿童的经历可能有所不同的一个维度与他们家庭的社会经济地位（SES）有关。 此外，众所周知，社会经济地位会影响广泛的认知发展指标，从智商测试到学业成绩。 本项目首先假设这些SES在认知发展方面的差异不能用家庭之间的先天差异来解释，而是由于与SES相关的许多经验差异中的一些。

Early Experience and Neurocognitive Development: Socioeconomic VariablesAbstractWith 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.