Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 5, 2026
P50 Sensory Gating in Infants
Published on: December 26, 2013
Children's event-related potentials of auditory selective attention vary with their socioeconomic status
Amedeo D'Angiulli1, Anthony Herdman, David Stapells
1Carleton University, Department of Psychology, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, Canada. amedeo@connect.carleton.ca
Insights
Socioeconomic status impacts children's auditory selective attention. Lower-SES children, despite similar performance, showed different brain activity, suggesting they use more resources to process irrelevant sounds.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Socioeconomic status (SES) is linked to cognitive development.
- Neuroimaging evidence directly linking SES to children's brain processes is limited.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between SES, cognitive performance, and neural correlates of auditory selective attention in children.
- To compare event-related potentials (ERPs) between lower- and higher-SES children during an auditory attention task.
Main Methods:
- Compared ERPs and electroencephalographic (EEG) theta activity in lower- and higher-SES preadolescent children.
- Utilized an auditory selective attention task with attended and ignored pure tones.
Main Results:
- Higher-SES children showed significant differences in ERPs (difference negativity) between attended and unattended tones, unlike lower-SES children.
- No group differences were found in reaction times or accuracy.
- EEG theta activity patterns differed, indicating distinct neural resource allocation between groups.
Conclusions:
- Despite similar behavioral performance, lower-SES children may recruit additional neural resources to manage auditory attention.
- Findings suggest SES influences the neural mechanisms underlying selective attention in children.
Abstract:
Past research suggests a link between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain processes in children, but direct evidence from neuroimaging is scarce. The authors investigated the relationships among SES, performance, and the neural correlates of auditory selective attention, by comparing event-related potentials (ERPs) in lower- and higher-SES preadolescent children during a task in which they attended to two types of pure tones but ignored two other types. Our hypothesis was that, at comparable performance levels, higher-SES children ignore distracters (the unattended, irrelevant tones) while lower-SES children attend equally to distracters and to targets (the attended, relevant tones). The authors found that ERP waveform differences between attended and unattended tones (Nd, difference negativity) were significant in the higher-SES but not in the lower-SES group. However, the groups did not differ in reaction times or accuracy. Electroencephalographic power analysis revealed a differential pattern of theta activity concomitant with irrelevant tones for the two groups, indicating that although they performed similarly the children from these groups recruited different neural processes. Lower-SES children, the authors suggest, deployed supplementary resources to also attend to irrelevant information.
