Socioeconomic status and memory
It influences all spectrums of a child's life, including cognitive development, which is in a crucial and malleable state during early stages of childhood.
In Canada, most children grow up in agreeable circumstances, however an unfortunate 8.1% are raised in households that fall into the category of low socioeconomic status.
These children are at risk for many disadvantages in life, including deficits in memory processing, as well as problems in language development.
[3] As reported by Staff et al. (2012), socioeconomic status measured early in childhood reared a significant difference in hippocampal size in adulthood, suggesting that there is in fact an impact on brain and cognitive development.
[3] If a child is constantly in a maladaptive environment, their hippocampal neurons may be performing poorly, and memory development may be sacrificed.
[7] Low socioeconomic status environments with a high stress factor can increase the memory processing for a particular unpleasant event.
Stressful environments impair a child's memories and increase the probability for reconsolidation and contamination of false information.
[2] Since children cannot choose the environments that they are raised in, parental influence can greatly aid or inhibit a child's cognitive development.
Low socioeconomic status due to poverty is a leading cause in hindered cognitive development in growing children.
A constant inadequate diet throughout early childhood deprives the brain of the nourishment it requires to develop and function successfully.
Children who live in high-risk environments of parental abuse express fluctuations in their ability of attentional skills due to constant fear or safety concerns.
However, families who are in the low socio-economic status can't always afford private school to provide the children with the highest quality of teachers and learning.
[9] Children who live in a low SES homes have difficulty learning how to develop and train the working memory.
Working memory gives the ability to keep languages, vocabulary and apt symbols readily available for communication with others and organization of thoughts.
For this reason, parents from high SES homes are more likely to see themselves as teacher figures and their children as students ready to learn.
[2] Children from low SES families who have had the unfair disadvantage of starting behind in language development do not tend to catch up, the delays may stay stable or increase in strength with age.
[19] The main diagnoses for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have issues with communication skills, social interactions and patterns of activity.
[22] Families with a higher SES have access to better health care and behavior intervention programs to help the child develop normally.
Parents of children with ASD and are in the low SES group, they generally don't have the education or the resources to help the child with working memory impairment and language deficits.
[21] Dr. Maureen Durkin, who is involved in the health sciences department at the University of Wisconsin, did a cross-sectional study to see if there was any correlation between children who are born with autism and socioeconomic status.
[25] Considering low SES is largely related to learning and language disabilities it is important to validate whether measures for such topics are free of socioeconomic influences.
Parent interaction, or the role of a caregiver in the home are of utmost important when developing vocabulary knowledge and strengthening the phonological loop.
[26] Indeed, measurements of children's vocabulary knowledge reinforced past research on the impact a child's environment can have on their language learning.
Measurements for non-word repetition and digit recall however showed no difference among scores between children of either High or Low SES.
These findings dictate that measurements purely involved in working memory and not associated with vocabulary are free of socioeconomic influence.
[26] Researchers can assume that working memory measurements are not biased to SES and can properly assess language development and other learning problems.
