Cognitive resilience and vulnerability to socioeconomic disadvantage: Predictors across individual, family, school, and neighborhood contexts

Though much research links socioeconomic disadvantage to cognitive difficulties during adolescence, many youth demonstrate resilience. Person-centered approaches can be used to quantify this developmental heterogeneity and challenge deficit-centered frameworks. This study leverages person-centered and data-driven methods to quantify and characterize cognitive heterogeneity in a socioeconomically diverse dataset of early adolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development℠ Study (N = 9,839; 47.7% female sex; Mage = 9.90 years; 46.7% White). Four profiles based on access to socioeconomic resources (SER) and multi-domain cognitive functioning were identified, including two profiles characterized by moderate-to-high-SER (74.5%) and two profiles characterized by low-SER (25.5%). Among youth in low-SER environments, 88.6% demonstrated cognitive performance scores similar to youth with moderate-to-high access to SER (“cognitive resilience”), whereas 11.4% demonstrated markedly lower performance relative to the other profiles (i.e., 1.3 to 2.3 SD below the sample mean; “cognitive vulnerability”). Ridge regression identified ecological factors associated with profile membership at the individual level and within family, neighborhood, and school contexts. Suburban residence (odds ratio [OR] = 1.30), advanced pubertal maturity (OR = 1.20), bilingualism (OR = 1.14), and greater caregiver monitoring (OR = 1.10) were most strongly associated with lower-SER youths’ membership in the resilient versus the vulnerable profile. Results emphasize the need to challenge deficit-centered frameworks by investigating heterogeneity within adversity-exposed youth and identifying context-specific risk and protective factors.