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When the poor excel: Poverty facilitates procedural learning
Author(s) -
Dang Junhua,
Xiao Shanshan,
Zhang Ting,
Liu Ying,
Jiang Bin,
Mao Lihua
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
scandinavian journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.743
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9450
pISSN - 0036-5564
DOI - 10.1111/sjop.12292
Subject(s) - categorization , poverty , psychology , task (project management) , cognition , cognitive psychology , working memory , social psychology , economics , computer science , artificial intelligence , economic growth , neuroscience , management
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.