Amedeo D'Angiulli

Sebastian Lipina

English

Crossref

Cognitive Sciences and Child 
Poverty: Facts and Challenges
Amedeo D'Angiulli
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Psychology, Neuroscience and Interdisciplinary 
Studies
& 
Sebastian Lipina
Unidad de Neurobiología Aplicada
Centro de Educacion Medica e Investigationes
Clinicas “Norberto Quirno” Buenos Aires Argentina
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Spedale degli Innocenti, 
Brunelleschi 1419, Florence, Italy
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Objective of present paper
Starting a reflective debate on the implicit and 
explicit conceptual and methodological 
assumptions underlying the current 
neurocognitive research on social inequality
This is intended as a criticism of the field 
targeting no one in particular and including the 
present authors!
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State of the art and why we need 
epistemological reflection now
FOCUS ON:
• Challenges in research interpretations
• “Cart before the horse” interventions
• Ethical paradox
• Media divulgation
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Definitional Issues
• Absolute vs. Relative Poverty  (Paradox in Developed 
countries as Canada)
• Indirect measurement in children, Socioeconomic 
status (SES) is measured in parents
• SES gradients vs. Extreme Groups Approach (EGA): 
Low, Middle and High SES: Poverty is just a cut off 
according to the EGA
• Low SES is poverty in the gradient perspective 
(although includes a wider interval it does include the 
extreme, lowest end of the distribution)
I WILL CONSIDER THIS LATTER ONE
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Challenge: Implicit (often 
unintentional) Deficit Attribution
• The IMPLICIT general consensus in 
interpreting the literature results has been 
that low SES is almost necessarily associated 
with both cognitive/behavioural pathologies 
or deficits.
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Deficit Attribution – Example 0
The risk is not only for the clear economic and 
health problems of being poor but also that 
their brains will fail to develop to their full 
potential. *…+ the risk from multiple influences 
of systemic poverty is that these children will 
suffer not only from loss of opportunity but 
from poor development of their nervous 
systems (Posner, 2010; underline added). Natu
re
 P
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Deficit Attribution – Example 1
"Kids from lower socioeconomic
levels show brain physiology
patterns similar to someone who
Actually had damage in the
frontal lobe as an adult…”
(US Berkeley News, 2008).
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Deficit Attribution – Example 2
lower-SES children may need to exert more effort
(resources) to perform like their higher-SES 
counterparts. In more complex tasks, where these 
children may be unable to deploy early selection 
to single out appropriate features (presumably 
more automatically), resources deployed for late 
selection may compromise the ability to manage 
information load and higher-order processing 
(D’Angiulli et al., 2008, p. 299)N
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Deficit Attribution – Example 3
Deficits and adaptations
Differences in neural processing that lead to 
performance deficits in laboratory tasks could, in 
certain contexts, be useful adaptations. Future 
research should, in interpretation and design, 
expressly consider the context of performance 
and processing strategies and investigate possible 
strengths and weaknesses. 
(Hackman & Farah, 2009, p. 70 Note: bold emphasis 
added).
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Methodological challenges, behavior
• the differences between low- and high-SES 
children on some ability and lab tests don’t 
necessarily or predominantly reflect differences 
in the assumed simple neurocognitive
operations
• Simple Broad Neuropsychological Systems can 
only be indirectly/correlationally linked to focal 
brain functions without concurrent 
neuroimaging evidence at the same level of 
“resolution”
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Methodological challenges, 
neurophysiology
• Most neuroimaging differences between Low vs. high 
SES children are obtained with similar performance 
levels, controlled or equated
• The interpretation of some brain signatures (ERP 
waves) are “validated” with respect to similarity to 
adult pathological conditions (stroke patients), so 
where’s the lesion?
• Correspondence between levels of functions and brain 
activation, must be shown in context and concurrently
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Interventions, putting the cart before 
the horse
Observed neural differences are used to argue that low-SES
children have neurocognitive impairments even if we are
not sure about what they really are
“…even when performance differences do not emerge
between lower and higher SES individuals, there are
differences in the degree to which specific neural systems
are recruited…” Hackman & Farah, 2009, p.67)
and this by default needs intervention/remediation “…to
protect and foster the neurocognitive development of low
SES children…” (Hackman & Farah, 2009, p. 71).
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Issues with Poverty as Deprivation
• Delay may reflect maturational plasticity (“late 
blooming” effects) or alternate pathways in 
relative poverty
• Intellectual deprivation refers to the kind and 
not to quantity of stimulation. What poor 
children may be deprived of is the same kind 
of stimulation expected in middle-high SES 
children, the one that will prepare them to do 
well in tests and school (Elkind, 1971; p. 73)
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All interventions in the same basket?
• Multimodular interventions are complex and 
include context not just lab effects
• No real Cognitive Neuroscience interventions 
have been validated (generally small samples)
• No intervention has been put in 
correspondence with neurocognitive
improvement, given a lesion or neuro deficit
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Ethical paradox
• High-SES children experience socioemotional
issues related to atypical development (Luthar
and Latendresse, 2005) 
• However, High-SES children are not by default 
seen as eligible for intervention. 
• Why? We argue: any other group except low 
SES may be seen as the “Normative” group. 
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Communicating with the Media:
A dangerous affair
• Myths and stereotypes about poverty
• Oversimplification of poverty
• Overgeneralization that discount wide 
individual differences among low-SES and 
poor children and families
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Bernardino Poccetti, Strage degli innocenti (dettaglio), 
1610
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Conclusions
• Facts: From the current state of the art we can 
only conclude low SES and relatively poor 
children show different neurocognitive
pathways than middle-SES children
• We need to elaborate proper 
conceptualization of such differences, 
differences cannot be interpreted as deficits 
and could be adaptive
• There needs to be a more critical debate about 
interventions, especially early interventions 
and the evaluation of success
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Cognitive Sciences and Child Poverty: Facts and Challenges

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4679/version/1/files/npre20104679-1.pdf

Cognitive Sciences and Child Poverty: Facts and Challenges

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