Mediating role of poverty in the association between environmental factors and cognitive performance in preschoolers

El rol mediador de la pobreza en la asociación entre factores ambientales y el desempeño cognitivo de preescolares.

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.

Cognitive development and poverty during childhood are complex phenomena that involve biological and psychosocial components (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Hackman, Farah, & Meany, 2010; Segretin et al., 2016). Although several environmental factors (e.g., maternal age, literacy activities) could influence basic cognitive functions (Sameroff, 1998; Zauche, Thul, Mahoney, & Stapel-Wax, 2016), the effects of some of them could vary according to whether the person lives in a poor home or not (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Sarsour et al., 2011). The literature has explored two main proposals: (a) one that analyzes how poverty impacts child cognitive development (Johnson, Riis, & Noble, 2016; Kishiyama, Boyce, Jimenez, Perry, & Knight, 2009; Segretin et al., 2016; Stevens, Lauinger, & Neville, 2009; Yoshikawa, Aber, & Beardslee, 2012); and (b) another that shows how environmental variables (e.g., health variables) affect cognition (Hackman et al., 2010; Rao et al., 2010; Ursache & Noble, 2016).

In general, these studies are based on associations between two variables. For example, a vast amount of literature indicates that growing in a poor home can modulate children’s academic outcomes and the emergence and development of different aspects of cognition and emotional behavior (Blair & Raver, 2016; Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997; Dickerson & Popli, 2016; Luby et al., 2013). In addition, other studies documented the association between environmental factors (e.g., maternal stress, literacy activities) and cognition. Most of them have shown only direct associations between those variables (Finegood, Raver, DeJoseph, & Blair, 2017; Rhoades, Greenberg, Lanza, & Blair, 2011; Sharkins, Leger, & Ernest, 2016). However, these studies contrast with reality, where these relationships (poverty, environment, and cognition) are the result of the interaction of a large number of variables (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Bronfenbrenner, 1992; Lipina & Colombo, 2009).

On the other hand, vast literature about mediation analysis attempts to explain in a more comprehensive way the complex interactions among poverty, environmental factors (other than poverty factors), and cognitive development. In general, these studies are focused on how poverty affects cognition and analyzes how this effect is mediated by other factors (Lipina et al., 2013; Rubio-Codina, Attanasio, & Grantham-McGregor, 2016). The most frequently analyzed mediating mechanisms are (a) physical health and nutrition of children, (b) type and quality of interactions between parents and children, (c) parental mental health, (d) possibilities/opportunities for affective and cognitive stimulation at home, and (e) material, health, educational, and institutional resources of the neighborhoods (Guo & Mullan Harris, 2000; Hackman et al., 2010; Sarsour et al., 2011; Sulik et al., 2015). In short, although various studies have introduced environmental factors as mediators of poverty effects on cognition (Blair et al., 2011; Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007), less is known about the opposite relationship: how poverty mediates the effects of environmental factors on cognition (Ronfani et al., 2015).

In such a context of analysis, we focused on self-regulation processes. Self-regulation is a multidimensional and complex construct that involves a set of cognitive and emotional processes occurring at different levels of organization implicated in the regulation of thoughts, emotions, and actions, and aimed at adaptation to several circumstances in everyday life (Bell & Deater-Deckard, 2007; Hofmann, Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2012; McClelland, Ponitz, Messersmith, & Tominey, 2010; Montroy, Bowles, Skibbe, McClelland, & Morrison, 2016; Nigg, 2017).

Specifically, we analyzed executive attention, inhibitory control, working memory, and planning processes, which are fundamental to cognitive activity and social behavior throughout life (Moffitt et al., 2011; Posner, Rothbart, & Tang, 2013). Particularly, executive attention is strongly activated in situations that entail attentional control, such as when there is conflict between responses suggested by stimulus dimensions (Posner & Raichle, 1998; Rueda, Rothbart, McCandliss, Saccomanno, & Posner, 2005). Inhibitory control involves the ability to control attention, behavior, thoughts, emotions, and/or external stimuli to suppress strong predispositions to act and allow more appropriate responses (Diamond, 2013). Working memory is the ability to maintain and manipulate online relevant information to perform a task (Diamond, 2013; Schelble, Therriault, & Miller, 2012; Sdoia, Di Nocera, & Ferlazzo, 2019). It makes it possible to retain a limited amount of information to generate possible solutions, while it is no longer perceptually present (Baddeley & Hitch, 1994; Bergman Nutley et al., 2011; D'Esposito & Postle, 2015; Smith & Jonides, 1999). Finally, planning can be defined as the ability to solve a problem by creating a strategy and an action plan that consist in executing and evaluating different steps (Debelak, Egle, Köstering, & Kaller, 2016; Shallice, 1982). Particularly, the importance of such competencies is that they are part of everyday behavior, and they are essential in the regulation of complex behaviors and the acquisition of early school learning (Bull & Lee, 2014; Diamond, 2013; Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008; Rothbart, Sheese, & Posner, 2008). We focused on preschool children because the early development of these cognitive processes could be susceptible to environmental influences, such as home and school experiences (Lipina et al., 2013; Rao et al., 2010; Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012; Vernon-Feagans, Willoughby, & Garrett-Peters, 2016).

Fluid reasoning is a complex human ability related to solving new problems independently of the knowledge previously acquired (Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, & Perrig, 2008). It is critical for solving different cognitive tasks and for adapting thinking to new situations. In addition, this skill is also involved in daily activities during child development and, specifically, in educational success (Green, Bunge, Chiongbian, Barrow, & Ferrer, 2017).

In this context, the research questions that guided this study were (1) does poverty mediate the association among environmental factors and the performance of cognitive processes? and, (2) does this mediation vary with each process?

It is important to highlight that one way to characterize poverty is the Unsatisfied/Satisfied Basic Needs (UBN/SBN) approach introduced in the 1980s by Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). It allows the identification of the structural causes of poverty (Minujin, 1992). Although this method determines whether a list of basic needs for a dignified life are satisfied in the households, it is not clear how this factor is related to other environmental variables (Martínez & Nicolini, 2017). Therefore, to answer these questions, the present study proposed to analyze poor homes (in terms of UBN or SBN) as a mediator in the associations between environmental factors and cognitive performance in a sample of preschoolers in the city of Buenos Aires.

Out hypotheses were as follows: (1) poverty will mediate the associations between attention, inhibitory control, working memory, planning, and fluid reasoning and specific environmental factors (i.e., family composition, reception of social benefits, child health, health risk factors, children and adults at home, maternal age, years of preschool attendance, literacy activities, and access to computer resources) (e.g., Ronfani et al., 2015); (2) different patterns of mediation will be identified based on cognitive processes and environmental factors (Hackman, Gallop, Evans, & Farah, 2015; Lawson et al., 2014; Lipina et al., 2013); and (3) cognitive differences will be based on socioeconomic disparities (Fracchia et al., 2016; Segretin et al., 2014, 2016).

The literature has traditionally analyzed the relation between poverty, environmental factors, and cognitive development, and the studies tend to focus on the direct associations between them (Blair, Ursache, Greenberg, Vernon-Feagans, & The Family Life Project Investigators, 2015; Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010; Ursache, Noble, & Blair, 2015; Weiland & Yoshikawa, 2013). More recently, other studies have explored how these associations are mediated by environmental factors (Hackman et al., 2015; Liberzon et al., 2015; Luby et al., 2013). Using such an approach, we analyzed the contribution of poverty to the association between specific environmental factors and cognitive skills. We identified the specific mediating role of poor and non-poor homes in the association between environmental factors – family composition, maternal age, health risk factors, child health, literacy activities, children and adults at home – and executive attention, inhibitory control, and fluid reasoning.

First, the results of this study show that children from poor homes had lower performance in tasks that demanded the identification of stimuli from the environment, flexibility to look for different sources of information to solve tasks where contingencies changed, interference control, and generation of sequences of actions to solve the tasks. These results add evidence to the literature on childhood poverty and cognition studies about the differences in the performance of children from different socioeconomic backgrounds (Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Farah et al., 2006, 2008; Hackman & Farah, 2009; Lipina & Colombo, 2009; Yoshikawa et al., 2012).

Second, in agreement with previous results (Fracchia et al., 2016; Lipina et al., 2005, 2013; Lipina & Colombo, 2009; Segretin et al., 2014, 2016), we identified significant differences in several environmental factors between socioeconomic groups. Specifically, families from the poverty group were exposed to more adults at home, younger mothers, a higher number of child health and health risk factors, a tendency to have more than one caregiver, almost one more year of preschool attendance, fewer books at home, lower frequency of book reading to children, and lower frequency of computer and internet use.

The results of our mediation analysis suggested that depending on the environmental factor analyzed, the proportion of poverty mediation varied from .15 to .40. For total mediation, the relation of the maternal age variable on the executive attention and fluid reasoning competencies was mediated largely by poverty. Several studies have indicated the association between maternal age and childhood cognitive and behavioral outcomes (Fall et al., 2015; Fergusson & Lynskey, 1993). However, our results suggested that whether a child lived in a poor home or not determined the correlation of this environmental factor on the child’s performance.

Also, poverty mediated the effects of children and adults at home on executive attention processes. This means that these relationships were fully explained by poverty or non-poverty backgrounds. Some evidence suggests that the number of people at home (whether children or adults) resulted in a lack of personal space or privacy and enforced intimate proximity to household members with communicable diseases and that the potentially excessive social or external demands could have harmful effects on cognition (Goux & Maurin, 2005; Leventhal & Newman, 2010).

The results of partial mediation analyses showed that the associations between family composition and performance in executive attention, fluid reasoning, and inhibitory control varied according to the socioeconomic backgrounds. Previous studies have indicated that children who lived with both parents had higher cognitive performance (e.g., Sarsour et al., 2011). However, the fact that this relationship varied according to poverty implied that beyond the direct effect of having one or both parents at home on executive attention, fluid reasoning, and inhibitory control, a large proportion of the association of this environmental factor depended on the socioeconomic conditions of the households. Hence, the effect of such a factor in the case of children living in poverty was different from those who lived in non-poor homes.

Likewise, the variable health risk factors affected children’s performance in executive attention and fluid reasoning tasks, and this relation was mediated by poverty. In accordance with our results, the literature showed that the presence of health risk factors in childhood was associated with impacts on cognitive development (Lengua et al., 2015; Weitzman, 2007). Nevertheless, the fact that poverty was a mediator implies that beyond the direct effect that health risk factors have on cognitive competences, their presence or absence influences children from poor homes and children from non-poor homes in different ways.

Literacy activities were associated with executive attention and fluid reasoning, and this association was mediated by poverty. Kegel and Bus (2014) suggested that children who had more literacy stimuli in their homes had higher cognitive performance. However, our results suggested that literacy activities do not have an identical effect on poor and non-poor contexts, beyond the direct relation that literacy activities have on executive attention and fluid reasoning.

Finally, the variables child health and children and adults at home were associated with fluid reasoning, and this relationship varied according to poverty.

These results showed that the environmental factors that we analyzed had different types of relationships when they were present in both UBN and SBN contexts. Because the frequency of single-parent households and children and adults at home were higher in poverty contexts, and the frequency of literacy activities was lower in those children, it is important to consider these variables as potential targets for future interventions aimed at optimizing cognitive processes skills in preschoolers from those contexts. Therefore, poverty did not mediate the relationship between environmental factors and cognitive performance in a uniform way, but its influence differed depending on the type of environmental factor. Additionally, results of the mediating effects of poverty were verified for three of the five cognitive processes analyzed. Thus, results indicated a differential sensitivity of each process to different environmental factors and the mediating role of poverty. This variation is consistent with other studies that indicated that not all aspects of the socioeconomic backgrounds affected the associations between environmental factors and cognitive development (Duncan & Magnuson, 2012; Duncan, Magnuson, & Votruba-Drzal, 2017; Lipina, 2016). In addition, this variation suggested different patterns of cognitive integration through development (Garon et al., 2008). These findings should not be generalized since this study has certain limitations that should be covered in future studies with different cognitive tasks for the same processes, a wider age range, different environmental factors, and different levels of organization (e.g., molecular, neural, and behavioral). Another limitation of the present work was the lack of psychometric information about the cognitive tasks, an issue that should be solved in future studies. Therefore, this generates the need to continue exploring (a) the application of this model of analysis with a more diverse set of self-regulatory tasks (e.g., flexibility); (b) more diverse samples in terms of individual and environmental factors; and (c) the influences of interventions, to better understand the development and integration of different cognitive processes during learning processes. Understanding these cognitive processes is necessary not only for improving cognitive performance but also for improving the general well-being of these populations (Campbell et al., 2002; Evans, 2016; Hoelscher, Moag-Stahlberg, Ellis, Vandewater, & Malkani, 2016). Specifically, social policy aimed at promoting human development in general, and child development in particular, should be designed together with scientific policies that provide information on what issues should be investigated based on the needs of each society. Although the information in this work must be taken cautiously due to the limitations mentioned above, it is useful since it contributes to optimizing the design of interventions aimed at fostering child cognitive development in populations exposed to poverty.

Citar este artículo como: Fracchia, C. S., Segretin, M. S. Hermida, M. J., Prats, L., y Lipina, S. J. (2020) Mediating role of poverty in the association between environmental factors and cognitive performance in preschoolers. Revista Argentina de Ciencias del Comportamiento, 12(2), 24-38

https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/racc/article/view/26482/30627 (pdf)