Lower childhood subjective social status is associated with greater neural responses to ambient auditory deviance

Humans early life experience varies by socioeconomic status, raising the question of how this difference is reflected in the adult brain. An important aspect of brain function is the ability to detect salient ambient changes while focusing on a task. Here we ask whether perceived childhood social standing is reflected by the way young adults brain signals correlate with detecting changes in irrelevant information. In two studies (total N = 58), we examine electrical brain responses in the frontocentral region to a series of auditory tones, consisting of "standard" stimuli (80%) and "deviant" stimuli (20%) interspersed randomly, while participants were engaged in various visual tasks. Both studies showed stronger automatic change detection indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) in lower-SES individuals, regardless of the sounds features, emotional content, or study type. Moreover, we observed a larger MMN in lower-SES participants, even though they did not show differences in brain and behavior responses to the attended task and did not involuntarily orient more attention to deviance, as indexed by the P3a. The study indicates that individuals with lower subjective social status may have an increased ability to automatically detect changes in their environment, which may suggest their adaptation to their childhood environments.