Poverty and the Brain: A Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis

描述（由申请人提供）：早在学龄前开始，并持续整个童年及以后，低SES的个人在各种心理测试中表现低于中产阶级。穷人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心灵和大脑的基本系统方面来描述这种差异的性质。另外的目标是了解这些潜在的影响，以先前的早期生活经验和由此产生的未来生活轨迹的关系。具体而言，认知神经科学的理论框架和方法将被用来解决贫困和认知之间的关系的几个基本问题。首先，贫困影响了心智和大脑发展的哪些基本系统？该项目将把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，枕颞/模式视觉，时间/记忆，额颞/语言和前额叶/执行，并进一步分析后者的工作记忆，奖励处理和冲突监控。这将通过对一组经过仔细筛选的中学生低SES儿童和一个中等SES对照组进行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，利用丰富的数据库的信息，低SES儿童的生活经历。神经认知系统调解弹性和成功的青春期也将寻求。最后，同一套神经认知系统将在一个较年轻的低SES儿童样本中进行评估，在5岁时，发展差异可能包括能力的存在与缺乏，而不是熟练程度，并且当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.