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March 31, 2015

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Study links income with child brain development

Children of richer, better-educated parents have bigger brains and more cognitive skills than their less-fortunate peers, but social help and teaching can help narrow the gaps, a study published yesterday said.

The distinctions were most profound in regions of the brain supporting language and reading, executive functions like memory and decision-making, and spatial skills, experts in the US reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The impact was “meaningful in terms of the way the brain is working in these kids,” study co-author Elizabeth Sowell of the University of Southern California said.

“We found that the relationship between brain (structure) and family income impacted kids’ cognitive functioning,” Sowell said by email.

The study stressed that solutions lay within reach, including better school lunches, motivated teaching and programs to encourage children.

Socioeconomic inequalities have long been seen as linked to differences in cognitive development, but the extent to which it affected brain structure was unclear until now.




 

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