Ethics

Socioeconomics and Brain Development

By Adam Kolber

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the work of Martha Farah et al. on the effect of socioeconomic status on brain development.  From the Chronicle:

For generations, psychologists have noted that children raised in poverty perform poorer on cognitive tests, on average, than do students from wealthier families. Some researchers have taken those results to argue that intelligence is determined for the most part by genetics and that certain races are inherently smarter than others. In 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray presented that case in their book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

But the new results from neuroscience indicate that experience, especially being raised in poverty, has a strong effect on the way the brain works. "It's not a case of bad genes," said Ms. Farah.

She and her colleagues have investigated the issue by trying to tease out which aspects of poverty alter specific cognitive skills, such as memory, language, and the ability to delay gratification.

. . .

When Ms. Farah's team tested 110 of those children, they found that particular cognitive skills were linked with certain aspects of the environment. Children with better language abilities were more likely to come from intellectually stimulating homes, no matter how nurturing their parents were. Memory skills, however, matched the nurturing levels in the home, reported Ms. Farah, who will publish her results in an upcoming issue of Developmental Science.

To test why, the researchers did MRI scans of the children. They found that students raised in nurturing homes generally had bigger hippocampi, the portion of the brain associated with forming and retrieving memories. The discovery dovetails with previous research in rodents, which showed that rats raised in a stressful environment develop smaller hippocampi.

Daniel Goldberg comments here.  (Thanks to Daniel for bringing the Chronicle article to my attention.)

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).