When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning
Recent research has shown that poverty directly impeded cognitive functions because the poor could be easily distracted by monetary concerns. We argue that this effect may be limited to functions relying on working memory. For functions that rely on proceduralized processes however, monetary concerns elicited by reminding of financial demands would be conducive rather than harmful. Our results supported this hypothesis by showing that participants with lower income reached the learning criterion of the informationāintegration categorization task faster than their more affluent counterparts after reminding of financial demands.
Source: Scandinavian Journal of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Junhua Dang, Shanshan Xiao, Ting Zhang, Ying Liu, Bin Jiang, Lihua Mao Tags: Cognition and Neurosciences Source Type: research