Poverty and the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis

描述（由申请人提供）：早在学前班开始，一直持续到整个童年乃至以后，低社会经济地位的个体在各种心理测试中的表现低于中产阶级的同龄人。穷人和中产阶级孩子之间的认知差异是明显的，会随着时间的推移而持续存在，并对未来生活的成功产生影响。这里提出的研究试图从受贫困影响的思想和大脑的潜在系统的角度来描述这种差异的本质。其他目标是了解这些潜在影响与先前的早期生活经历和由此产生的未来生活轨迹之间的关系。具体来说，认知神经科学的理论框架和方法将被用来解决关于贫困与认知之间关系的几个基本问题。首先也是最重要的：贫穷会影响心智和大脑的哪些潜在系统？本项目将已知的认知差异划分为5个关键的神经认知系统：顶叶/空间、枕叶-颞叶/模式视觉、颞叶/记忆、额叶-颞叶/语言、前额叶/执行，并将后者进一步分析为工作记忆、奖励处理和冲突监测。这将通过行为测试和功能神经成像来完成一组经过仔细筛选的中低社会经济地位儿童和中等社会经济地位对照组。随后，神经认知分析的结果将用于寻找因果机制，利用有关低社会经济地位儿童生活经历的丰富信息数据库。神经认知系统调解弹性和成功的青春期也将寻求。最后，同样的一套神经认知系统将在年龄更小的低社会经济地位儿童样本中进行评估，在5岁时，发育差异可能包括能力的存在与缺乏，而不是熟练程度，并且在学校表现的基础正在奠定。

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. 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 5 key neurocognitive systems: Parietal/spatial, Occipito-temporal/pattern vision, Temporal/memory, and Fronto-temporal/language, and Prefrontal/executive, with further analysis of the latter into working memory, reward processing, and 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. Finally, the same set of neurocognitive systems will be assessed in a younger sample of low SES children, at age 5, when developmental disparities can consist of presence versus absence of ability, rather than degrees of proficiency, and when the foundations of school performance are being laid.