Wang Shanshan, Yang Dong
Department of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
MOE (Ministry of Education) Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Front Psychol. 2020 Nov 12;11:566375. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.566375. eCollection 2020.
Previous studies have shown that poverty influences cognitive abilities and that those who have a negative living environment exhibit worse cognitive performance. In addition, eye measures vary following the manipulation of cognitive processing. We examined the distinctive changes in impoverished and affluent persons during tasks that require a high level of concentration using eye-tracking measures. Based on the poverty effect in impoverished people, this study explored how wealth state awareness (WSA) influences them. It was found that the pupillary state indexes of the impoverished participants significantly changed when their WSA was regarding poverty. The results suggest that awareness of poverty may cause impoverished individuals to engage in tasks with more attention allocation and more concentration in the more difficult tasks but that a WSA regarding wealth does not have such effect on them. WSA has no significant effects on their more affluent peers. The findings of this study can contribute to research on WSA effects on impoverished individuals from the perspective of eye measures.