Resumen

LOZANO GUTIERREZ, Asucena  y  OSTROSKY, Feggy. Effect of Socioeconomic Status in Inhibitory Control During Preschool Age. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2012, vol.2, n.1, pp.521-531. ISSN 2007-4719.

Socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with cognitive ability and school achievement during childhood and adolescence. Previous studies have pointed out that executive functioning and language are key processes affected by variations in SES. These effects can be found even in the preschool age and subsist probably into adulthood. Among executive functions, inhibitory control plays a crucial role in allowing preschool children to engage efficiently in more complex tasks and in enhancing the development of other executive functions, thus allowing self regulation, which is particularly important during this developmental stage. Inhibitory control is a complex construct characterized as the ability to suppress a dominant response while a subdominant one is activated, or the delaying of responses and slowing of motor activity. Furthermore, due to its protracted development from infancy through adolescence and even adulthood, this cognitive process results especially susceptible to the influence of the adverse factors associated with low SES. The purpose of this study was to identify differences in inhibitory control in preschool children from high and low SES. We assessed a sample of 231 preschool children between 4 and 6 years old. In order to assess different components of inhibitory control, selection of measures included tasks of cognitive and motor inhibition (stroop like tasks and a motor tapping test) as well as a gratification delay task (gift delay task). Results showed that measures of cognitive and motor inhibition were affected by SES, suggesting that this variable is crucial in determining the development of the ability to suppress dominant responses through the usage of effective strategies. The ability to delay a response to obtain a reward seems to depend on other variables possibly linked to temperament and parenting, due to children of low SES outperforming children from high SES. These data agree with existing results in terms of the relevance of SES to account for the differences observed in cognitive performance, and highlight the need of studying the exact mechanism through which SES influences cognition.

Palabras llave : Socioeconomic status; Inhibitory control; Executive functions; Childhood; Development.