Socioeconomic status (SES) has been recognized as an important factor in psychological research within the last few decades. Past literature recognizes that having lower SES can have a negative impact on many aspects of one’s health, especially in diseases related to brain aging. A recent avenue for research regarding SES and the brain-behavior relationship suggests that socioeconomic status can act as a moderator for brain activation during task performance. The hypothesis for this project was that there will be a negative correlational relationship between brain activity and SES when controlling for participants’ age, sex, and performance on the episodic memory tasks, but a positive correlation between task performance and SES was expected.

With 100 middle-aged healthy adults from the Reference Ability Neural Network (RANN) study (53 male and 47 female, age M=48.0 +/- 7.55 years), three episodic memory fMRI tasks were performed and studied in relation to SES and age. The tasks were Logical Memory, Word Order, and Pair Associates tasks that involved episodic memory for story details, order of words presented, and pairing of words, respectively. We quantified memory performance with average accuracy from performance of the three tasks. We used the FSL software to preprocess and perform voxel-wise group analysis. All brain activation analyses were corrected for multiple comparison using cluster thresholds in FSL.

Correlation between SES and memory performance was found to be marginally significant (R=.188, p=.061). All tasks had areas of positively correlated activation for age. The Logical Memory task had multiple areas of brain activation that were positively correlated with age, particularly at the lateral occipital cortex, lingual gyrus, and the occipital fusiform gyrus, all areas that underlie visual processing. There were no areas of correlated brain activation for SES, sex, and task performance for the Pair Associates and Logical Memory tasks. Brain activation for the Word order task in the left precuneous cortex and the right middle frontal gyrus, left lateral occipital cortex, left occipital fusiform gyrus, and parts of the lingual gyrus was positively correlated with memory performance when controlled for age, sex, and SES.

The hypothesis was not entirely supported by the results of this study, but the marginal effect between SES and memory performance can suggest that SES may affect memory performance within middle-aged adults. While we did not find a brain association with SES in this age group, we observed regions that underlie task performance. Further research can be done on possible moderating effects of Socioeconomic Status on memory and executive function with structural neuroimaging to further investigate the effects of SES on cognition.