Brain Development in the Context of Poverty: Factors Predicting Cognitive Resilience

Study Context

Decades of psychological and economic science point to the detriments of growing up in poverty, particularly for children’s cognitive and academic performance. But there is massive variability in outcomes for children in poverty—many of whom perform quite well. How do high-performing children in poverty achieve this resilience in the face of structural barriers to success? Neuroscience can help shed light into whether children achieve high performance through the underlying brain mechanisms as children above poverty.

In prior studies based on higher income children, cognitive performance is best when the system in the brain that is involved in focused, goal-oriented mental activity operates independently from the system that is involved in unfocused, non-task oriented mental activity. This fits with the broader view that in order to perform well, children must focus narrowly on the task at hand while inhibiting irrelevant information. The research team tested this question directly using data from children living in poverty from the largest sample of brain development to date.

Study Design

This study used longitudinal data from the US-based Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, which includes nearly 10,000 children, 1,303 of whom live in poverty. The research team examined MRI scans and used measures of children’s brains at rest at age 10, which are thought to reflect recent thought patterns, and examined their association with cognitive and academic performance at ages 10 and 12. They looked at a pattern of resting brain activity previously associated with high performance—less communication between brain regions that underlie performance of demanding external tasks (e.g., taking a test) and those that underlie internally-directed thoughts (e.g., thinking about things outside of the here and now).

Results and Policy Lessons

The research team found that for higher-income children, less communication between the brain regions underlying externally- and internally-directed thoughts was associated with high cognitive performance. However, for lower-income children, the opposite pattern—more communication between brain regions underlying external and internal thoughts – was associated with better performance. This association was present cross-sectionally and longitudinally, for children’s performance on standardized measures of cognition, their grades in school, and their attention problems.

Contradicting prior understanding of higher cognition, these results suggest that for children living in poverty, it is adaptive for the system involved in external thought to work in tandem with the system involved in internal thought. While future research is needed to understand this mechanism more clearly, these findings reveal that children in poverty might rely on different mechanisms to perform well, suggesting there is no one, normative way to develop in all circumstances.

To find out more about this project, see the video below: