Attentional control as a double-edged sword: Distractor processing and its potential benefits in individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

This study examines whether individuals from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds would show greater conceptually based implicit priming from distracting information. In two experiments, we measured the conceptually based implicit priming of participants from lower-SES and higher-SES backgrounds using a category generation task (Experiment 1) and a general knowledge task (Experiment 2), each preceded by an incidental-encoding task (a color-naming Stroop task in Experiment 1 and a 1-back task involving pictures with irrelevant words superimposed in Experiment 2). The results showed that, regardless of whether it was the category generation task or the general knowledge task, participants in the lower-SES background group had higher conceptually based implicit priming scores. The research results indicate that participants from lower-SES backgrounds show greater conceptually based implicit priming from distracting information. Therefore, this finding may suggest that participants from lower-SES backgrounds process irrelevant information and use it to improve their performance on subsequent tasks. From the perspective of adaptive development, it offers a new viewpoint for further understanding the cognitive adaptations of attentional processing in individuals from lower-SES backgrounds when facing socioeconomic disadvantage.