Findings of a new study have showed that the process of brain development is on a slower side in children growing up in poor households compared to their counterparts in rich households. As a result, their performance suffers greatly in schools.

For the study, researchers examined hundreds of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans from a group of children from poor households. The researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that the regional grey matter volume in those poor children was not in line with the developmental norm for their ages. It was 4% below than what it should have been as per standards.

Published in JAMA Pediatrics, the research has showed that performance of children living in poor households 1.5 times below the federal poverty level suffers badly because of slow brain development.

The researchers discovered that the score of poor children in general intelligence tests was four to eight points lower than rich children. "I was surprised that there wasn't more of a continuum, where the poorer a child was the worse they did, and the wealthier they [were] the better. Instead, it seems like there is a critical point", said the study's senior author Seth D. Pollak, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

The researchers figured out that the reason behind up to 20 percent of "achievement deficits" in test performance among poor children was delayed maturity in their frontal and temporal lobes.

The study showed that financial resources of a family play a big role in child's structural development of the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, and hippocampus.