title: When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning.
abstract: 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 information-integration categorization task faster than their more affluent counterparts after reminding of financial demands.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Junhua
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Dang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stockholm University, Sweden.
authors.forename: Shanshan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Xiao
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, China.
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, China.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, China.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, China.
authors.forename: Lihua
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Mao
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011203:Poverty / Q000523:psychology*; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Poverty; cognitive functions; information-integration; procedural learning