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Chapter 16The Developing Adolescent Brainin Socioeconomic ContextMartha J. Farah, Kimberly G. Noble, and Hallam HurtSome of the most promising approaches to the study of adolescence focus onneurocognitive function. In addition to mapping developmental change in the brainsystems responsible for cognitive abilities such as attention, memory, and inhibitorycontrol (e.g., Sowell, Thompson, & Toga, this volume), it is possible to identifyand intervene on risk factors for adolescent development in terms of individualdifferences in these systems (e.g., Greenberg, Riggs, & Blair, this volume; Rueda,Rothbart, Saccomanno, & Posner, this volume). This chapter is aimed at understandingthe neurocognitive basis of a major influence on adolescent development,namely socioeconomic status (SES).SES is typically measured by a combination of income, educational attainment,and occupation status, although it encompasses a large number of correlated factorssuch as neighborhood quality, family structure (e.g., one-parent versus two-parentfamilies), and physical health. Adolescents of low SES are more likely than theirmiddle-SES counterparts to drop out of school, suffer major psychiatric illness, becomeparents at an early age, and come under the control of the criminal justice system.Given the importance of SES for adolescent development, it is important tounderstand its neurocognitive basis, including the neurocognitive correlates of SESand the aspects of childhood experience that affect adolescent neurocognitive status.The correlations between SES and children’s performance on standardized testssuch as IQ tell us that SES must be related to brain development, as cognitive ability373