Childhood socioeconomic status and executive function in childhood and beyond

Briana S Last; Gwen M Lawson; Kaitlyn Breiner; Laurence Steinberg; Martha J Farah

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0202964

Childhood socioeconomic status and executive function in childhood and beyond

PLoS One. 2018 Aug 24;13(8):e0202964. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0202964. eCollection 2018.

Authors

Briana S Last¹, Gwen M Lawson¹, Kaitlyn Breiner², Laurence Steinberg³, Martha J Farah¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.
² Department of Psychology, The University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, United States of America.
³ Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

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.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Adolescent
Behavior / physiology
Child
Executive Function*
Female
Humans
Male
Memory, Short-Term
Social Class*
Spatial Memory

Associated data

figshare/10.6084/m9.figshare.6670820

Grants and funding

This research is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Its contents reflect the views of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the official views of either the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation or the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience (www.lawneuro.org). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.