BRAIN differences seem to separate rich and poor children. The discovery could guide ways to improve cognition in deprived, underperforming children.
Children in higher-income families, with more-educated parents, are known to outperform their less-privileged peers in intelligence tests and academic results, perhaps because they have access to more books and educational toys and tend to be exposed to less stress.
To discover the neural basis for the differences, at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues tracked brain activity in 7 to 13-year-olds while they performed an undemanding shape-recognition task. Almost all performed well, but those from families of lower socioeconomic status had less activity in the prefrontal cortex, which controls attention and allocates brain resources.
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Kishiyama says that the activity deficit may underlie poor performance in harder cognitive tasks and suggests giving underperforming children tasks that will boost activity in this region. MRI scans showed no structural differences between the two groups, suggesting that the differences were not permanent. The work will be published in the .
