Working memory linked to parents' education

Working memory - the ability to hold information in your mind and use it to guide behaviour - may be influenced by parents' education, a new study has found.
Working memory is key for successful performance at school and work.
Previous research with young children has documented socioeconomic disparities in performance on tasks of working memory, researchers said.
The new study has found that differences in working memory that exist at age 10 persist through the end of adolescence.
The study also found that parents' education - one common measure of socioeconomic status - is related to children's performance on tasks of working memory, and that neighbourhood characteristics - another common measure of socioeconomic status - are not.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, West Chester University, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, appears in the journal Child Development.

"Understanding the development of disparities in working memory has implications for education," according to Daniel A Hackman, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Pittsburgh who led the study when he was a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Persistent disparities are a potential source of differences in academic achievement as students age and as the demands of both school work and the social environment increase," Hackman said.

"The fact that parents' education predicts working memory suggests that parenting practices and home environments may be important for this aspect of cognitive development and as a fruitful area for intervention and prevention," he said.
To look at the rate of change in working memory in relation to different measures of socioeconomic status, the researchers studied more than three hundred 10- through 13-year-olds from urban public and parochial schools over four years.
The sample of children was racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse. Each child completed a number of tasks of working memory across the four-year period.
The researchers gathered information on how many years of education the parents of each child had completed, as well as on neighbourhood characteristics, looking - for example - at the degree to which people in a child's neighbourhood lived below the poverty line, were unemployed, or received public assistance.

Neither parents' education nor living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood was found to be associated with the rate of growth in working memory across the four-year period.
Lower parental education was found to be tied to differences in working memory that emerged by age 10 and continued through adolescence.