Family's economic situation influences brain function in children

Mobile neuroscience lab looks at differences in brain activity across social spectrum in Canada

Children of low socioeconomic status work harder to filter out irrelevant environmental information than those from a high-income background because of learned differences in what they pay attention to, according to new research published in the open access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

Numerous studies in the past few years have begun to reveal how poverty affects brain development and function. In 2008, Amedeo D'Angiulli of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and his colleagues used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain wave patterns associated with an auditory selective attention task in children of high and low socioeconomic status (SES).

They found that the two groups of children exhibited differences in theta brain waves in the frontal lobe, which plays an important role in attention. This suggested that each group of children recruits different neural mechanisms for this particular type of task, and that the lower SES children allocate additional resources to attending to irrelevant information.