Meredith Wesley J, Cardenas-Iniguez Carlos, Berman Marc G, Rosenberg Monica D
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Dev Psychobiol. 2022 May;64(4):e22258. doi: 10.1002/dev.22258.
Individual differences in children's cognitive abilities impact life and health outcomes. What factors influence these individual differences during development? Here, we test whether children's environments predict cognitive performance, independent of well-characterized socioeconomic effects. We analyzed data from 9002 9- to 10-year olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, an ongoing longitudinal study with community samples across the United States. Using youth- and caregiver-report questionnaires and national database registries (e.g., neighborhood crime, walkability), we defined principal components summarizing children's home, school, neighborhood, and cultural environments. In two independent samples (ns = 3475, 5527), environmental components explained unique variance in children's general cognitive ability, executive functioning, and learning/memory abilities. Furthermore, increased neighborhood enrichment was associated with an attenuated relationship between sociodemographics and general cognitive abilities. Thus, the environment accounts for unique variance in cognitive performance in children and should be considered alongside sociodemographic factors to better understand brain functioning and behavior across development.
儿童认知能力的个体差异会影响生活和健康状况。在发育过程中，哪些因素会影响这些个体差异呢？在此，我们测试儿童的环境是否能独立于已明确的社会经济影响来预测认知表现。我们分析了来自青少年大脑认知发展研究的9002名9至10岁儿童的数据，这是一项正在进行的针对美国各地社区样本的纵向研究。通过青少年和照顾者报告问卷以及国家数据库登记（如邻里犯罪、步行便利性），我们定义了概括儿童家庭、学校、邻里和文化环境的主要成分。在两个独立样本（n分别为3475和5527）中，环境成分解释了儿童一般认知能力、执行功能和学习/记忆能力的独特差异。此外，邻里环境丰富度的增加与社会人口统计学与一般认知能力之间关系的减弱有关。因此，环境在儿童认知表现中占独特差异，应与社会人口统计学因素一并考虑，以更好地理解整个发育过程中的大脑功能和行为。
