Rich and poor children use brains differently

William Atkins
Sunday, 04 January 2009 21:47

Science - Biology

Knight added, “We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."

Other studies have shown this association between the prefrontal lobe area of the brain and behavioral differences of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

However, Kishiyama stated, "… those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity."

The authors think that “stressful environments” and “cognitive impoverishment” are to blame in the underperformance of the poor children. However, they also admit other factors are most likely also involved.

They further contend that this discovery could help scientists with improving cognitive response in children of poor backgrounds.

Knight comments on the condition of the poor children: "It's not a life sentence. We think that with proper intervention and training, you could get improvement in both behavioral and physiological indices." [UCB]

Knight concludes with this statement, "This is a wake-up call. It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums." [UCB]