Giving low-income families more money changes a child’s brain activity, and the effect can be seen by a child’s first birthday.
“Neuroscientists have described links between a child’s socioeconomic background and the structure of the brain,” says Kimberly Noble at Columbia University in New York. “But all that work has been correlational to date.”
Instead, Noble and her team are looking at how exactly child poverty causes reduced grey matter volume in the hippocampus and frontal cortex, which is associated with the subsequent development of thinking and learning. These changes have been seen throughout childhood and adolescence.
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