It’s no surprise that individual families provide different types of resources to their children; for example, some are able to provide more financial resources, while others offer more robust social supports.
New research demonstrates that the specific resources available during childhood can impact a person’s cognitive function later in life. This ground-breaking study by researchers at Cornell Human Ecology found that the types of resources available during childhood affect the cognitive mechanisms people use to evaluate risk as adults.
The study, published last month in the journal Cerebral Cortex, included 43 college students who played computerized games that evaluated risk-taking while they underwent fMRI brain scans. After the games, the participants completed a survey about their parents’ income during childhood, how they perceived their childhood neighborhood’s quality and safety, their current economic resources, and the level of social support they currently received from family and friends.
Researchers used the survey results to classify participants into two categories: socially rich or economically rich. Their analysis found that participants classified as socially rich, with strong social support but whose family had less money, and those who are economically rich, having more money but less social support, took similar levels of risk during the computer games. But those games activated different parts of participants’ brains depending on the types of resources available to them.
“Distinct early-life environments may offer you different types of resources, and different strategies, to solve common problems in life,” explained Minwoo Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. “This, over time, may shape the specific cognitive mechanisms or contextual factors people rely on to solve similar problems as adults.”
Researchers found people from socially or economically rich backgrounds were equally likely to take risks. But people from socially rich backgrounds had more brain activity in the visual and attention processing areas of the brain during the computer games.
And the level of brain activity in those areas depended on their current social resources; those with more current social support had less brain activity, took more risks, and earned more money than those in the socially rich group who had less current social support.
“We’re able to show that there is some common mechanism that’s involved across both groups that helps them engage in risk-taking situations,” said Lee. “But there seems to be this calibration process that is not necessarily about the outcome behavior itself, but how individuals get there. Even though they behaved similarly, they were relying on differential neural and contextual mechanisms to take risks.”
Although an all-student sample is not normally ideal for this type of research, in this case it was advantageous, explained Marlen Z. Gonzalez, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell and a co-author of the paper.
“That’s because you have individuals who have variability in their experiences, but end up coming together in the same place: here on campus,” she explained. “I tend to think of psychological costs and behaviors as tactics and strategies they use to navigate the world around them. And it is important to include resources as part of that equation. There are multiple resources that can be used to overcome stressors and adversity.”
Why does this research matter? Insights into how social and economic experiences in childhood shape decision-making later in life can be used to help develop support programs, whether through public policy, community investment, or student support services, the researchers said.
The take-home message: New research suggests that the resources available during childhood affect the cognitive mechanisms that people use to evaluate and take risks later in life.
