Emile Dimas

Pattern learning reveals brain asymmetry to be linked to socioeconomic status

Timm B Poeppl

Emile Dimas

Katrin Sakreida

Julius M Kernbach

Ross D Markello

Oliver Schöffski

Alain Dagher

Philipp Koellinger

Gideon Nave

Martha J Farah

Bratislav Mišić

Danilo Bzdok

Abstract Socioeconomic status (SES) anchors individuals in their social network layers. Our embedding in the societal fabric resonates with … (see more)habitus, world view, opportunity, and health disparity. It remains obscure how distinct facets of SES are reflected in the architecture of the central nervous system. Here, we capitalized on multivariate multi-output learning algorithms to explore possible imprints of SES in gray and white matter structure in the wider population (n ≈ 10,000 UK Biobank participants). Individuals with higher SES, compared with those with lower SES, showed a pattern of increased region volumes in the left brain and decreased region volumes in the right brain. The analogous lateralization pattern emerged for the fiber structure of anatomical white matter tracts. Our multimodal findings suggest hemispheric asymmetry as an SES-related brain signature, which was consistent across six different indicators of SES: degree, education, income, job, neighborhood and vehicle count. Hence, hemispheric specialization may have evolved in human primates in a way that reveals crucial links to SES.

2022-05-20

Cerebral Cortex Communications (published)

doi.org

Publisher Correction: The default network of the human brain is associated with perceived social isolation

R. Nathan Spreng

Emile Dimas

Laetitia Mwilambwe-Tshilobo

Alain Dagher

Philipp Koellinger

Gideon Nave

Anthony Ong

Julius M Kernbach