Corrigendum: Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02735.].

Risks for Child Cognitive Development in Rural Contexts.

While poverty all over the world is more typical and extreme in rural contexts, interventions to improve cognition in low socioeconomic status (SES) children are for the most part based on studies conducted in urban populations. This paper investigate how poverty and rural or urban settings affect child cognitive performance. Executive functions and non-verbal intelligence performance, as well as individual and environmental information was obtained from 131 5-year-old children. For the same level of SES, children in rural settings performed consistently worse than children in urban settings. These differences could be accounted mostly by the months of past preschool attendance and the father's completed level of education. These results should inform policies and programs for children living in rural poverty worldwide, and specially in Latin America.

Parsing a perceptual decision into a sequence of moments of thought.

Theoretical, computational, and experimental studies have converged to a model of decision-making in which sensory evidence is stochastically integrated to a threshold, implementing a shift from an analog to a discrete form of computation. Understanding how this process can be chained and sequenced - as virtually all real-life tasks involve a sequence of decisions - remains an open question in neuroscience. We reasoned that incorporating a virtual continuum of possible behavioral outcomes in a simple decision task - a fundamental ingredient of real-life decision-making - should result in a progressive sequential approximation to the correct response. We used real-time tracking of motor action in a decision task, as a measure of cognitive states reflecting an internal decision process. We found that response trajectories were spontaneously segmented into a discrete sequence of explorations separated by brief stops (about 200 ms) - which remained unconscious to the participants. The characteristics of these stops were indicative of a decision process - a "moment of thought": their duration correlated with the difficulty of the decision and with the efficiency of the subsequent exploration. Our findings suggest that simple navigation in an abstract space involves a discrete sequence of explorations and stops and, moreover, that these stops reveal a fingerprint of moments of thought.