Diferenças cognitivas entre grupos de crianças de zonas rurais e urbanas distintas

Abstract

There is little doubt that intelligence is associated with different levels of social and educational achievements, professional success, income, health of individuals. A causal relationship between these variables has generally been interpreted as oneway, ie, the intelligence would be the biggest promoter of social change. Little has explored the effect of environmental differences in cognitive differences of people. Therefore, this study compared the cognitive status of 499 school children from six to nine years of urban and rural areas of three cities in different levels of social development. City of lower socioeconomic development (Americaninha MG) 91 children attended rural (year 2004). City of greater socioeconomic development (Belo Horizonte MG) participated 66 rural children (year 2011) and 342 urban children (year 2004 and 2006). As cognitive measures were used Raven's Progressive Matrices and Arithmetic subtests and Digit Test of Intelligence Scales for Children Wechsler III. The results showed that urban children in Belo Horizonte had the best cognitive performance in three cognitive measures. Soon to follow was the better cognitive performance of children of rural Belo Horizonte and then the children of rural Americaninha. The largest mean difference was found in the Raven test, a measure of fluid intelligence, equivalent to 12.5 points (or 33 points of IQ) in favor of urban children in Belo Horizonte compared to the children of ruralAmericaninha. These results may be an evidence of the impact of differences in socioeconomic development of geographic context on individual differences in cognition citizens. .