Lower childhood subjective social status is associated with greater neural responses to ambient auditory deviance

Abstract

The early life experience of people varies by socioeconomic status, raising the question of how this difference is reflected in the adult brain. An important aspect of brain function is the ability to focus on a task while maintaining the ability to detect salient changes in the task-irrelevant background. Here we ask whether SES, as measured by perceived social standing, is reflected by the way brain signals, measured with an electroencephalogram, correlate with detecting changes in irrelevant information. We study electrical brain activities in the frontocentral region to a series of auditory tones composed of "standard" (80%) stimuli randomly interspersed by "deviant" (20%) stimuli while subjects were engaged in visual tasks. In study 1, participants focused on a silent documentary movie with captions (N = 16); in study 2, participants (N = 42) focused on image sequences incorporating neutral or negative content. Both studies showed stronger automatic change detection indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) in lower SES individuals, regardless of sound features, emotional content, or study types. In addition, a larger MMN was observed despite comparable task performance across SES. Our study indicates low SES participants' higher sensitivity to detect ambient auditory changes.

Childhood adversity is not associated with lowered inhibition, but slower perceptual processing: A Drift Diffusion Model analysis

“…Over time, cognitive adaptations to such conditions could result in a general tendency to use a more diffuse scope of attention, leading to an enhanced ability to keep track of the broader environment. In line with this hypothesis, people with lower SES respond more strongly to auditory distractors (Giuliano et al, 2018;Hao & Hu, 2022;Stevens et al, 2009) and are faster to orient their attention to peripheral visual information (Mezzacappa, 2004). While potentially adaptive, a more diffuse scope of attention could come at the cost of lowered ability to ignore irrelevant distractors.…”