Ear to the ground! socioeconomic status, environmental stress, and the neural substrate of selective attention

Abstract

We reanalyzed data originally published by Berman and Friedman (1995), who recorded event related potentials (ERPs) while children and adults with low, medium, and high socioeconomic status (SES) detected oddball auditory targets (tones and consonant–vowel sequences) among distractors. The ERP differential measuring how much attention was allocated to the targets vs. distractors increased significantly with SES, independently of age. To explain these findings, we integrate the ear to the ground hypothesis and the socioenvironmental epigenetic stress approach. According to the ear to the ground hypothesis, frequent and prolonged environmental uncertainty and hazard induce low-SES children to learn adaptive over-vigilance, attending disproportionately to stimuli that are currently irrelevant but may quickly become relevant and thus require an immediate survival response. Socioenvironmental epigenetic stress refers to the bidirectional interaction between a stress-inducing environment and the impact and expression of transgenerational gene selections in low-SES contexts. Because low-SES individuals are historically under and misrepresented in research, the proposed framework contributes to increase our understanding of how socioeconomic and environmental conditions may affect neurocognitive development. This offers significant points of entry for future interventions and policies targeting macrosocial settings (i.e., education and the justice system) and microsocial ontogenetic settings (i.e., individuals and families).