n the family environment Diamond and Lee ; Gathercole and Baddeley Regarding the visuospatial component of the working memory, in those cases where visuospatial processing is very complex, the central executive component is triggered to assist in solving the task Gathercole and Baddeley In turn, these skills are influenced by the experiences of children in the family environment — opportunities to perform tasks and demands of the environment that require the use of strategies to memorize information, for example — at school, and, thus, from the SES Nelson and Fivush In the present study, a significant contribution of the SES and parental education especially maternal to the latent variable executive functions was detected.
The inhibitory control assessed by go-no go tasks for example occurs late in childhood. At 10 years of age, the ability to inhibit attention to irrelevant stimuli and motor responses is fairly complete, being usually mastered at the age of 12 Romine and Reynolds In agreement with this assumption, in this study, it was found that only between 10 and 12 years, the difference in the go- no go task regarding SES was significant, and low SES children performing poorer in this task compared to those from higher SES.
Models that include environmental, biological and cognitive factors try to explain the development of executive functions Blair and Ursache ; Stuss They integrate the results of empirical research on the physiology of stress, neurocognitive functions and self-regulation and consider the adaptive processes response to adversity of the environment as an aspect of development of the child Blair and Raver For example, Stuss propose a model with three hierarchical levels of processing: sensory-perceptual, executive control and self-reflexivity metacognition , that interacting with the external environment and are mediated by the frontal lobes.
The levels are interrelated and depend on the maturity of primary to higher processes functioning. So, living in an adverse environment could impair the development of primaries levels and it would impact in the development of superior levels Stuss
Genetic and Environmental Influences on Intelligence
Here, we systematically explore the association between SES and brain anatomy through MRI in a group of 23 healthy year-old children with a wide range of parental SES. We confirm behaviorally that language is one of the cognitive domains most affected by SES. A lower SES is associated with smaller volumes of gray matter in bilateral hippocampi, middle temporal gyri, left fusiform and right inferior occipito-temporal gyri, according to both volume- and surface-based morphometry. Moreover, we identify local gyrification effects in anterior frontal regions, supportive of a potential developmental lag in lower SES children. In contrast, we found no significant association between SES and white matter architecture. These findings point to the potential neural mediators of the link between unfavourable environmental conditions and cognitive skills.
Childhood socioeconomic status cSES is found to predict later-life cognitive abilities, yet the mechanisms underlying these associations remain unclear. The objective of this longitudinal study was to examine the direct and indirect paths through which cSES influences late midlife cognitive outcomes. At mean ages 20 and 62, participants completed a standardized test for general cognitive ability GCA. The age 62 cognitive assessment also included in-person tests of processing speed, episodic memory, abstract reasoning, working memory, verbal fluency, visual-spatial ability, and executive functions. Multiple mediation analyses were conducted to examine the direct path effects and indirect path effects of cSES through age 20 GCA, adult SES, and cognitive leisure activities on seven cognitive outcomes at age 62, adjusting for age, ethnicity, and non-independence of observations.
Socioeconomic status and genetic influences on cognitive development
Research on the heritability of IQ inquires into the proportion of variance in IQ that