Driving Naari Programme launched in Chandigarh
Massachusetts [US], February 6, 2024 (ANI): Neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that socioeconomic factors might influence the brain’s susceptibility to pleasant events, which is important for motivation and attention.
In a study of 12 to 14-year-olds with considerably varying socioeconomic status (SES), researchers discovered that children from lower SES homes were less sensitive to reward than those from more affluent backgrounds.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the research team measured brain activity as the children played a guessing game in which they earned extra money for each correct guess.
When participants from higher SES backgrounds guessed correctly, a part of the brain called the striatum, which is linked to reward, lit up much more than in children from lower SES backgrounds.
The brain imaging results also coincided with behavioural differences in how participants from lower and higher SES backgrounds responded to correct guesses. The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment by dampening its response to rewards, which are often scarcer in low SES environments.
