Abstract
Socioeconomic status (SES) predicts health, wellbeing, and cognitive ability, including executive function (EF). A body of recent work has shown that childhood SES is positively related to EF, but it is not known whether this disparity grows, diminishes or holds steady over development, from childhood through adulthood. We examined the association between childhood SES and EF in a sample ranging from 9–25 years of age, with six canonical EF tasks. Analyzing all of the tasks together and in functionally defined groups, we found positive relations between SES and EF, and the relations did not vary by age. Analyzing the tasks separately, SES was positively associated with performance in some but not all EF measures, depending on the covariates used, again without varying by age. These results add to a growing body of evidence that childhood SES is associated with EF abilities, and contribute novel evidence concerning the persistence of this association into early adulthood.
Highlights
Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is predictive of performance on a range of neurocognitive measures [1,2], including executive function (EF) tasks [3]
The effect of childhood SES did not differ as a function of age of testing, with SES interacting with neither age (p = 0.32) nor age2 (p = 0.98)
Gender was a significant predictor only for the Stroop task, with females performing better, and the effect of site was significant for one task, with University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA) subjects performing better on verbal fluency
Summary
Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) is predictive of performance on a range of neurocognitive measures [1,2], including executive function (EF) tasks [3]. Given that EF abilities predict important life outcomes [4,5,6], and partially mediate the relation between SES and academic achievement in early [7] and later [8] childhood, the study of SES and EF is of practical as well as scientific interest. The SES of all subjects, regardless of age, was estimated as their family SES at the age of 8–10 years old Subjects or their parents (depending on subject age at testing) retrospectively reported parents’ educational attainments and occupations at this time. These aspects of SES are typically recalled with accuracy even years later. If similar effects of the SES measure are obtained with both analyses, they can more confidently be interpreted as reflecting the effect of SES per se
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