Poverty and the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis

描述(由申请人提供)：从学龄前开始，一直持续到童年及以后，SES低的人在各种心理测试中的表现都低于他们的中产阶级同行。贫穷和中产阶级儿童之间的认知差异是强大的，随着时间的推移而持续存在，并对未来的生活成功产生影响。这里提出的研究试图从受贫困影响的大脑和大脑的基本系统的角度来描述这种差异的性质。其他目标是了解这些潜在影响与先前的早期生活经验和由此产生的未来生活轨迹的关系。具体地说，认知神经科学的理论框架和方法将被用来解决关于贫困和认知发展之间关系的几个基本问题。首先，也是最重要的：贫困会影响大脑发育中的哪些基本系统？这个项目将把已知的认知差异划分为七个关键的神经认知系统：顶叶/空间、枕叶-时间/图案视觉、时间/记忆、额叶-时间/语言、外侧前额/工作记忆、腹内侧前额/奖赏处理以及前扣带/冲突监测。这将通过对一组经过仔细筛选的中学年龄低SES儿童和一组中等SES对照组的行为测试和功能神经成像来完成。随后，神经认知分析的结果将被用于寻找因果机制，利用关于低SES儿童生活经历的丰富信息数据库。调节韧性和成功青春期的神经认知系统也将被寻求。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Beginning as early as preschool, and persisting throughout childhood and beyond, individuals of low SES perform below their middle class counterparts on a variety of psychometric tests. The cognitive disparities between poor and middle class children are robust, persistent over time, and have consequences for future life success. The research proposed here seeks to characterize the nature of the disparity in terms of the underlying systems of the mind and brain affected by poverty. Additional goals are to understand the relation of these underlying effects to both antecedent early life experiences and resultant future life trajectories. Specifically, the theoretical framework and methods of Cognitive Neuroscience will be used to address several basic questions about the relation between poverty and cognitive development. First and foremost: What underlying systems of the developing mind and brain are impacted by poverty? This project will partition the known cognitive disparities, previously assessed with the relatively complex tasks of standardized psychological assessment, into seven key neurocognitive systems: Parietal/spatial, Occipito-temporal/pattern vision, Temporal/memory, and Fronto-temporal/language, Lateral prefrontal/working memory, Ventromedial prefrontal/reward processing, and Anterior cingulated/conflict monitoring. This will be accomplished with behavioral testing and functional neuroimaging of a cohort of carefully screened middle school-aged low SES children and a middle SES comparison group. Subsequently, the results of the neurocognitive analysis will be used in the search for causal mechanisms, drawing upon a rich database of information about the life experiences of the low SES children. Neurocognitive systems mediating resilience and successful adolescence will also be sought.