Environmental and Socioeconomic Influences on Cognition
Research articles on environmental and socioeconomic influences on cognition.
- Poverty and Children’s Brain Development
How does growing up in poverty affect brain development? Research on the neuroscience of socioeconomic disadvantage and evidence-based interventions that can close the...
- Mediterranean Diet and Brain Health
The Mediterranean diet has accumulated more cognitive-aging research than any other dietary pattern. The evidence base now spans observational cohorts of millions of...
- How Air Pollution Affects the Brain
Air pollution’s effects on the lungs and cardiovascular system are well documented, and a growing body of research identifies an additional target: the brain.
- Does Cannabis Lower Your IQ?
Whether cannabis lowers IQ depends on three variables: age at first use, cumulative intensity of use, and how the outcome is measured.
- Sex Differences in Early Education and Cognition
When children from low-income backgrounds attend high-quality early childhood education programs, boys and girls show similar gains in IQ and reading by school entry.
- Prenatal Phthalate Exposure and Brain Development
A 2023 longitudinal study from the Generation R cohort followed 775 mother-child pairs from pregnancy through age 14 and asked a precise question: do phthalates — the...
- Air Pollution and Cognitive Function
For decades, the public conversation about air pollution focused on lungs and hearts. Over the last fifteen years, evidence has accumulated that the brain — and...
- Caregiving and Adolescent Cognitive Outcomes
The Trude et al. (2021) analysis published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health tested whether two operationally distinct components of nurturing care—responsive...
- Maternal Vitamin D and Brain Development
Maternal vitamin D status during pregnancy has drawn attention as a possible lever for offspring brain development. Observational cohort data link higher...
- Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals and Child Brain Development
Children’s developing brains are exquisitely vulnerable to chemical exposures during specific windows of prenatal and early-postnatal development — windows during which...
- Maternal Obesity and Child Cognitive Outcomes
Across more than thirty cohorts representing tens of thousands of mother-child dyads, maternal pre-pregnancy body mass index shows a small but consistent inverse...
- Family Size and Children’s Cognitive Development
Children from larger families score, on average, slightly lower on cognitive tests and complete slightly less schooling than children from smaller families.