Investigating how learning mindset prevents negative effects of poverty on neural processes that support reward-modulated attention and executive control in middle adolescents

Learning mindset directly affects the way people overcome challenges in learning. It also optimizes the balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation—an important factor that leads to learning success. Fixed mindset, or the belief that intelligence is immutable, has been shown to hinder academic success in children of all ages, while growth mindset, or the belief that intelligence is malleable and can be changed, has been shown to be a good indicator that predicts their academic progress and future achievement in their career. Poverty and low socioeconomic status (SES) are also important factors that create the inequality in our educational system and prevent many children in poor and lower-class families to overcome challenges in learning. In recent years, neuroscience research has shown that learning mindset and SES influence how the brain develops to support selective attention, executive function, and reward processing. However, it is unclear how these two factors jointly impact these cognitive functions and their underling neural mechanisms, especially in middle adolescents. In this age group, brain regions in the frontal cortex, known to control attention and executive function, are not fully matured. Moreover, the basal ganglia, known to support reward processing is hypersensitive to immediate rewards, making this population most vulnerable to immediate rewards that may divert their attention from relevant tasks required to overcome learning challenges and thus hinder them from academic success. Here, I propose a research study that will investigate the joint contribution of learning mindset and SES on neural mechanisms that support reward-modulated attention and executive function in middle adolescents. I hypothesize that the hypersensitivity to immediate rewards, especially in the low-SES group, will interfere with their intrinsic motivation— an important factor that helps them overcome learning challenges. However, having a growth mindset will help optimizing the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, making make adolescents more adaptable to conflict resolutions in learning difficult behavioral tasks. Ultimately, research findings from this proposed study will help guide the development of learning mindset intervention based on neural evidence, when applied to the boarder population will help improve overall academic achievement in Thai adolescents and help reducing the inequality in education and the gap in SES in Thai society.