New Study: The Impact of a Poverty Reduction Intervention on Infant Brain Activity

Posted by on February 1, 2022

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences found that cash transfers to mothers experiencing poverty in the first year of their children’s lives may change infant brain activity. The study uses data from the Baby’s First Years experiment, which randomly divided 1,000 low-income mothers into two groups with one receiving an unconditional monthly cash payment of $333 and the other receiving $20 over the first seven years of their children’s lives. Researchers then used an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure electrical activity in the brains of 435 of the 1,000 babies. The EEG readings showed that the babies whose mothers received the unconditional monthly cash payments had higher frequency brain activity than those in the lower payment group. The researchers state that this analysis is one of the first of its kind to provide evidence that an intervention designed to reduce poverty appears to cause changes in children’s brain functioning in ways that have been linked to subsequent higher cognitive skills.

Read more.