The Wealth State Awareness Effect on Attention Allocation in People From Impoverished and Affluent Groups.

Shanshan Wang,Dong Yang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.566375

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that poverty influences cognitive abilities and that those who have a negative living environment exhibit worse cognitive performance. In addition, eye measures vary following the manipulation of cognitive processing. We examined the distinctive changes in impoverished and affluent persons during tasks that require a high level of concentration using eye-tracking measures. Based on the poverty effect in impoverished people, this study explored how wealth state awareness (WSA) influences them. It was found that the pupillary state indexes of the impoverished participants significantly changed when their WSA was regarding poverty. The results suggest that awareness of poverty may cause impoverished individuals to engage in tasks with more attention allocation and more concentration in the more difficult tasks but that a WSA regarding wealth does not have such effect on them. WSA has no significant effects on their more affluent peers. The findings of this study can contribute to research on WSA effects on impoverished individuals from the perspective of eye measures.

Highlights

Poverty poses a major issue as it can restrict the development of human beings and society
We found several interesting differences in both groups by further analysis; that is, the wealth state awareness (WSA) effect resulted in significant differences in poor group (PG) as compared to the rich group (RG), which did not exhibit significant differences
The present study utilized eye-tracking methods to investigate the WSA effect on resistance to interference in people from families with different income levels by combining revised visual searching tasks with a distractor

Summary

Introduction

Poverty poses a major issue as it can restrict the development of human beings and society. Defined as a scarcity of financial resources or material possessions (Flythe, 2013; Akfirat et al, 2016), poverty has a cumulative long-term impact on cognition from childhood. It can hinder brain development (Cowell, 2008) and eventually reduce adult cognitive capacity (Evans and Schamberg, 2009), especially damaging attention (Hunt, 2011). Studies of Mani et al (2013) have shown that the damage caused by poverty is not irreversible They found that cognitive performance improved after the farmers’ harvest (when they were rich) compared to before the harvest (when they were poor). Based on poverty damage cognition being not irreversible, we aim to explore the influence of poverty on people from the eye movement perspective, which suggests a close relationship between eye movement and cognition

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