Demir Özlem Ece, Prado Jérôme, Booth James R
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, USA.
Dev Sci. 2015 Sep;18(5):799-814. doi: 10.1111/desc.12268. Epub 2015 Feb 9.
We examined the relation of parental socioeconomic status (SES) to the neural bases of subtraction in school-age children (9- to 12-year-olds). We independently localized brain regions subserving verbal versus visuo-spatial representations to determine whether the parental SES-related differences in children's reliance on these neural representations vary as a function of math skill. At higher SES levels, higher skill was associated with greater recruitment of the left temporal cortex, identified by the verbal localizer. At lower SES levels, higher skill was associated with greater recruitment of right parietal cortex, identified by the visuo-spatial localizer. This suggests that depending on parental SES, children engage different neural systems to solve subtraction problems. Furthermore, SES was related to the activation in the left temporal and frontal cortex during the independent verbal localizer task, but it was not related to activation during the independent visuo-spatial localizer task. Differences in activation during the verbal localizer task in turn were related to differences in activation during the subtraction task in right parietal cortex. The relation was stronger at lower SES levels. This result suggests that SES-related differences in the visuo-spatial regions during subtraction might be based in SES-related verbal differences.
我们研究了父母社会经济地位（SES）与学龄儿童（9至12岁）减法运算神经基础之间的关系。我们分别定位了支持语言与视觉空间表征的脑区，以确定儿童对这些神经表征的依赖程度上与父母SES相关的差异是否会因数学技能的不同而有所变化。在较高的SES水平下，较高的技能与由语言定位器识别出的左侧颞叶皮质更大程度的激活相关。在较低的SES水平下，较高的技能与由视觉空间定位器识别出的右侧顶叶皮质更大程度的激活相关。这表明，根据父母的SES，儿童会运用不同的神经系统来解决减法问题。此外，SES与独立语言定位任务期间左侧颞叶和额叶皮质的激活有关，但与独立视觉空间定位任务期间的激活无关。语言定位任务期间的激活差异反过来又与减法任务期间右侧顶叶皮质的激活差异有关。这种关系在较低的SES水平下更强。这一结果表明，减法运算期间视觉空间区域中与SES相关的差异可能基于与SES相关的语言差异。
