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Lecture focuses on poverty and brain development
2:58 p.m., Dec. 8, 2006--Martha J. Farah, director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on the effects poverty has on brain development in children in a lecture Thursday evening, Dec. 7, at UD's Early Learning Center. Citing statistics from three studies conducted on two different socioeconomic groups of children (one living just below the poverty line and the other defined as working- to middle-class), Farah hypothesized that poverty has a greater detrimental effect on a child's overall cognitive skills than pre-natal exposure to cocaine. “What our studies found is that prenatal cocaine exposure is not as hard on a child's development as poverty is,” Farah said, addressing an audience of approximately 25 UD graduate students and faculty members. At the outset of her lecture, “Socioeconomic Status, Childhood Experience and Brain Development,” Farah said that the median ages of the groups of children in the three studies were 5 years and 10 months, 6 years and 11 years and defined socioeconomic status as being measured by income level, parental educational level and parental occupational status. While citing numbers and clinical statistics, however, Farah emphasized that poverty--particularly as it relates to a child's brain development--is not just about financial status, but also about the status of a child's home environment. “Of all the factors that might make a marked difference in a child's cognitive abilities,” Farah said, “the one factor that seems to make a significant difference is environmental stimulation in a child's home.”
“What we learned from going into the homes of 118 children with low socioeconomic status is that environmental stimulation is critical to a child's welfare,” Farah said. Farah received bachelor of science degrees in both philosophy and metallurgy and materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977 and her doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1983. She did postdoctoral work in neuropsychology at both MIT and the Boston University School of Medicine and was a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University from 1985-92. Since 1992, Farah has been a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also has served as the director of the institution's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience since 1999 and has been a senior fellow in its Center for Bioethics since 2005. She has devoted much of her career to understanding the mechanisms of vision, memory and executive function in the human brain, and in recent years has shifted her focus to the interface between cognitive neuroscience and the real world. Farah has published widely and has received several academic honors, including the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1992 and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1996. Article by Becca Hutchinson
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