For poorer children, living in a high-cost area hurts development

Young children in lower-income families who live in high-cost areas don't do as well academically as their counterparts in low-cost areas, according to a new study.

The study, by researchers at Child Trends and the University of California (UCLA), appears in the journal Child Development.

"Among families with incomes below 300 percent of the federal poverty threshold—that's below $66,339 for a family of four—living in a region with a higher cost of living was related to lower academic achievement in first grade," according to Nina Chien, a research scientist with Child Trends, who coauthored the study.

"This is the first study to show that income isn't enough," Chien added. "Cost-of-living differences also matter for children's development, particularly for children from lower-income families."

Researchers used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort, a nationally representative sample of more than 17,500 children at more than 2,000 schools who started kindergarten in 1998. They estimated the relation among such factors as cost of living, family income, material hardship, parents' investments in their children's educational activities, as well as assessments of parents' psychological well-being (such as moms' reports of depressive symptoms and conflict in the marriage), parenting practices (such as warmth and having routines), and school resources.

Researchers then looked at these factors in relation to children's academic achievement (as measured by teachers' reports and tests of how well the children read and did math), and social-emotional development (as measured by teachers' reports of children's behavior problems and social skills).

In addition to the pattern for all families with incomes below 300 percent poverty, findings specific to families below 100 percent of the federal poverty level pointed to further differences. Among children who lived in families below 100 percent of the federal poverty threshold, those who lived in a higher-cost area (compared to those in a lower-cost area) had parents who made fewer investments in educational activities and went to schools with fewer resources.

"This makes sense," Chien notes. "For poor families already struggling to meet basic needs such as housing, utilities, and food, living in a higher-cost area meant that families had little left over to afford educationally enriching materials or activities for their children."

Differences for lower-income families according to cost of living in the area of residence held even when taking into account a comprehensive set of demographic variables. The pattern was not seen in children from more affluent families, suggesting that their academic achievement wasn't as sensitive to cost-of-loving variations.

"Many government assistance programs are applied by income and don't take into account variations in cost of living," Chien notes. "Our findings suggest that poor and lower-income families living in higher-cost areas may have a greater need for public assistance to offset the higher costs of basic expenditures."

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Practicing music for only few years in childhood helps improve adult brain

A little music training in childhood goes a long way in improving how the brain functions in adulthood when it comes to listening and the complex processing of sound, according to a new Northwestern University study.

The impact of music on the brain has been a hot topic in science in the past decade. Now Northwestern researchers for the first time have directly examined what happens after children stop playing a musical instrument after only a few years -- a common childhood experience.

Compared to peers with no musical training, adults with one to five years of musical training as children had enhanced brain responses to complex sounds, making them more effective at pulling out the fundamental frequency of the sound signal.

The fundamental frequency, which is the lowest frequency in sound, is crucial for speech and music perception, allowing recognition of sounds in complex and noisy auditory environments.

"Thus, musical training as children makes better listeners later in life," said Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern.

"Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain," she said, "the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning."

"A Little Goes a Long Way: How the Adult Brain is Shaped by Musical Training in Childhood" will be published in the Aug. 22 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.

"We help address a question on every parent's mind: 'Will my child benefit if she plays music for a short while but then quits training?'" Kraus said.

Many children engage in group or private music instruction, yet, few continue with formal music classes beyond middle or high school.

But most neuroscientific research has focused on the rare and exceptional music student who has continued an active music practice during college or on the rarer case of a professional musician who has spent a lifetime immersed in music.

"Our research captures a much larger section of the population with implications for educational policy makers and the development of auditory training programs that can generate long-lasting positive outcomes," Kraus said.

For the study, young adults with varying amounts of past musical training were tested by measuring electrical signals from the auditory brainstem in response to eight complex sounds ranging in pitch. Because the brain signal is a faithful representation of the sound signal, researchers are able to observe how key elements of the sound are captured by the nervous system and how these elements might be weakened or strengthened in different people with different experiences and abilities.

Forty-five adults were grouped into three age- and IQ- matched groups based on histories of musical instruction. One group had no musical instruction; another had 1 to 5 years; and the other had to 6 to 11 years. Both musically trained groups began instrumental practice around age 9 years, a common age for in-school musical instruction to begin. As predicted, musical training during childhood led to more robust neural processing of sounds later in life.

Prior research on highly trained musicians and early bilinguals revealed that enhanced brainstem responses to sound are associated with heightened auditory perception, executive function and auditory communication skills.

"From this earlier research, we infer that a few years of music lessons also confer advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communication situations, such as noisy restaurants or rides on the "L," Kraus said.

A running theme in Kraus' research is "your past shapes your present."

"The way you hear sound today is dictated by the experiences with sound you've had up until today," she said. "This new finding is a clear embodiment of this theme."

In past research, Kraus and her team examined how bilingual upbringing and long-term music lessons affect the auditory brain and how the brain changes after a few weeks of intensive auditory experiences, such as computerized training. Their current research is investigating the impact of socioeconomic hardships on adolescent brain function.

"We hope to use this new finding, in combination with past discoveries, to understand the type of education and remediation strategies, such as music classes and auditory-based training that might be most effective in combating the negative impact of poverty," she said.

By understanding the brain's capacity to change and then maintain these changes, the research can inform the development of effective and long-lasting auditory-based educational and rehabilitative programs.

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Intense prep for law school admission test alters brain structure

Intensive preparation for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) actually changes the microscopic structure of the brain, physically bolstering the connections between areas of the brain important for reasoning, according to neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

The results suggest that training people in reasoning skills – the main focus of LSAT prep courses – can reinforce the brain's circuits involved in thinking and reasoning and could even up people's IQ scores.

"The fact that performance on the LSAT can be improved with practice is not new. People know that they can do better on the LSAT, which is why preparation courses exist," said Allyson Mackey, a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute who led the study. "What we were interested in is whether and how the brain changes as a result of LSAT preparation, which we think is, fundamentally, reasoning training. We wanted to show that the ability to reason is malleable in adults."

The new study shows that reasoning training does alter brain connections, which is good news for the test prep industry, but also for people who have poor reasoning skills and would like to improve them. The findings are reported today (Wednesday, Aug. 22) in the open access journal Frontiers in Neuroanatomy.

"A lot of people still believe that you are either smart or you are not, and sure, you can practice for a test, but you are not fundamentally changing your brain," said senior author Silvia Bunge, associate professor in the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "Our research provides a more positive message. How you perform on one of these tests is not necessarily predictive of your future success, it merely reflects your prior history of cognitive engagement, and potentially how prepared you are at this time to enter a graduate program or a law school, as opposed to how prepared you could ever be."

John D. E. Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research, noted that researchers in the past have shown anatomical changes in the brain from simpler tasks, such as juggling or playing a musical instrument, but not for tasks as complex and abstract as thinking or reasoning, which involve many areas of the brain.

"I think this is an exciting discovery," he said. "It shows, with rigorous analysis, that brain pathways important for thinking and reasoning remain plastic in adulthood, and that intensive, real-life educational experience that trains reasoning also alters the brain pathways that support reasoning ability."

Harnessing brain's spatial areas improves deductive reasoning

The results also suggest that LSAT training improves students' reasoning ability by strengthening the connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. According to Bunge, director of the Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, deductive reasoning, such as language comprehension, taxes a predominantly left-hemisphere brain network, whereas spatial cognition taxes a predominantly right-hemisphere network.

"You could argue that, to the extent that you can employ spatial cognition to think through a verbal problem, you would have the edge," she said.

The structural changes were revealed by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans of the brains of 24 college students or recent graduates before and after 100 hours of LSAT training over a three-month period. When compared with brain scans of a matched control group of 23 young adults, the trained students developed increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain, and between frontal and parietal lobes.

"A lot of data on reasoning has suggested that it is left-hemisphere dominant," Mackey said. "But what we thought originally was that this kind of reasoning training would require repeated co-activation of frontal and parietal cortices on both sides of the brain. Our data are consistent with the idea that, while reasoning is left-hemisphere dominant, with training you learn to compensate; if you are not very good at reasoning, you start bringing on the right side."

The study focused on fluid reasoning –- that is, the ability to tackle a novel problem, which is central to IQ tests and has been shown to predict academic performance and performance in demanding careers, Bunge said.

"People assume that IQ tests measure some stable characteristic of an individual, but we think this whole assumption is flawed," Bunge said. "We think that the skills measured by an IQ test wax and wane over time depending on the individual's level of cognitive activity." One fascinating question, Gabrieli noted, is whether the brain changes observed in this study persist for months or longer after the training.

For the past decade, Bunge has studied the ability to integrate multiple pieces of information, "which we see as central to all tests of reasoning," she said.

LSAT prep students are highly motivated study group

Mackey and Bunge showed several years ago that children can improve their reasoning skills by regularly playing commercially available games that involve reasoning, though the researchers did not have the opportunity to test for actual physical changes in the brain. In searching for a program that provides adults with intensive reasoning training, they hit upon the idea of recruiting aspiring lawyers preparing for the LSAT. Allyson discovered that the company Blueprint Test Preparation offered 100 hours of class time, including 70 hours of reasoning training. With the company's cooperation, she recruited students as they signed up for a Blueprint LSAT course. This arrangement allowed her to test whether training changes brain structure in a group of highly motivated young adults.

Mackey and Bunge tested for changes in the white matter of the brain, the brain tissue that contains the connections between the brain's neurons. These connections, called axons, are surrounded by a variety of support cells called glia, some of which form myelin that insulates the axons and speeds the passage of signals. In animal studies, increased myelination and glial support cells are associated with learning, and a recent study found that some of these glial cells provide energy to the axons.

Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), they followed water movement in the white matter and found differences, on average, between the trained group and the control group. Specifically, the trained group showed a change in the directionality of water diffusion that is consistent with increased myelination. Also, near the boundary between the white matter and gray matter, the trained group showed a reduction in water diffusion, possibly because of more densely packed glial cells. While the real cause of the changes in water diffusion is unclear, the researchers said, it reflects an alteration in the microstructure of the brain associated with a change in cognitive activity.

"One thing that gives us confidence in these data is that a lot of these changes are in the tracts that connect frontal and parietal cortex, or between different hemispheres in those areas, and frontal and parietal regions are absolutely essential for reasoning," Bunge said. "So, we are seeing the changes exactly where we would expect to see them. And we think that they reflect strengthening of the connections between them."

"This work could inspire further research in non-human animals, because there seems to be a resurgence of interest in environmental influences on the brain," Bunge said, noting that, in the 1960s and '70s, UC Berkeley Professors Mark Rosenzweig and Marion Diamond conducted landmark research on the effects of environmental enrichment on behavior and brain anatomy in rats.

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