Association between Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status and Executive System Activation in Youth

Low socioeconomic status has been shown to have detrimental effects on cognitive performance, including working memory (WM). As executive systems that support WM undergo functional neurodevelopment during adolescence, environmental stressors at both individual and community levels may have a particularly strong impact on cognitive outcomes. Here, we sought to examine how neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) impacts task-related activation of the executive system during adolescence, and to determine whether this effect mediates the relationship between neighborhood SES and WM performance. To address these questions, we studied 1,158 youths (age 8-22) that completed a fractal n-back WM task during fMRI at 3T as part of the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort. We found that higher neighborhood SES was associated with greater activation of the executive system to WM load, including the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and precuneus. These associations remained significant when controlling for related factors like parental education and exposure to traumatic events. Furthermore, high dimensional multivariate mediation analysis identified two distinct patterns of brain activity within the executive system that significantly mediated the relationship between neighborhood SES and task performance. Together, these findings underscore the importance of the neighborhood environment in shaping executive system function and WM in youth.