them use IQ or academic achievement measures Forns et al. In the present study, neuropsychological variables were added to traditional IQ evaluation, following recent studies that assess neuropsychological functions separately Noble and Farah ; Raizada and Kishiyama Family SES, especially during early childhood, seem to affect performance in some neuropsychological systems more than in others, particularly memory episodic, working and semantic , oral and written language and executive functions Hackman et al.
Such influence is more prominent at younger ages Tomalski et al. In the first years of childhood, the socioeconomic status is very important for children development, since it may limit the conditions for stimulation, access to materials and activities that favor cognitive development Forns et al.
About that neuropsychological functions development, the neural structures necessary for language processing are available in children from an early age and this skill is developed and strengthened from the experiences, social relations and communication interactions and is therefore a complex process Finkbeiner and Coltheart The acquisition of written language literacy occurs later in childhood, being an ongoing task, which is enriched with new skills as the individual develops and interacts with the environment.
In this sense, environmental aspects, both social and economic - as material resources -, and psychosocial - like mental health of parents and family relations - have been linked to academic performance and the development of language Marturano ; Noble et al. The executive functions have been defined as a set of skills that in an integrate manner, enable the individual to direct behaviors to goals, performing voluntary actions.
According to Diamond , the core executive functions are inhibition — response inhibition and interference control —, working memory and cognitive flexibility Diamond As Weyandt highlights, these definitions differ to the degree of emphasis placed either in process control, working memory, inhibition, or other components. There is a progressive development of inhibitory function and the prefrontal areas of the brain.
Thus, younger children are less efficient in inhibiting behavior than older children that will improve this ability with age Brocki and Bohlin Although working memory can be considered as a subcomponent of executive functions Blair et al. In its classic formulation, working memory consists of separate storage buffers for verbal and visuospatial content, as well as executive processes that act upon the information in the storage buffers Baddeley Besides the study of the influence of a socioeconomic index on the development of those cognitive functions, some authors have studied specific influences of family variables, such as parental education.
The educational level of parents, especially the mother Cesare et al. As Carneiro et al. It seems that more educated mothers are more likely to have better educated husbands, higher income, they are more likely to invest in books, special lessons and materials like computers for their children and those things could explain the maternal education impact in children cognitive development Carneiro et al.
In this study, one of the research questions is to investigate the specific role of parental education, as a separate variable of the SES, asking which SES variables actually impact in neuropsychological development. Although it has been demonstrated that better environmental conditions are associated with better performance in neuropsychological tasks Evans and Fuller-Rowell ; Noble and Farah , some studies found no differences associated to the socioeconomic status in the performance of executive functions inhibitory control Wiebe et al.
This lack of effect can be partly explained by sample performance homogeneity Wiebe et al. In Engel et al. Miranda et al. So, it seems the results from those Brazilian studies run into methodological obstacles that have produced biases in their research and hindered the analysis of their data.
In short, 