Cognitive Resilience and Vulnerability to Socioeconomic Disadvantage: Predictors Across Individual, Family, School, and Neighborhood Contexts

Though much research links socioeconomic disadvantage to cognitive difficulties during adolescence, many youth demonstrate resilience. Person‐centered approaches can be used to quantify this developmental heterogeneity and challenge deficit‐centered frameworks. This study leverages person‐centered and data‐driven methods to quantify and characterize cognitive heterogeneity in a socioeconomically diverse sample of early adolescents from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study ( N = 9839; 47.7% female sex; M age = 9.90 years; 46.7% White). Four profiles were identified based on their access to socioeconomic resources (SER) and multi‐domain cognitive functioning, including two profiles characterized by moderate‐to‐high SER (74.5%) and two profiles characterized by low SER (25.5%). Among youth in low‐SER environments, 88.6% demonstrated cognitive performance scores similar to youth with moderate‐to‐high access to SER (“cognitive resilience”), whereas 11.4% demonstrated markedly lower performance relative to the other profiles (i.e., 1.3–2.3 SD below the sample mean; “cognitive vulnerability”). Ridge regression identified ecological factors associated with profile membership at the individual level and within family, neighborhood, and school contexts. Suburban residence (odds ratio [OR] = 1.30), advanced pubertal maturity (OR = 1.20), bilingualism (OR = 1.14), and greater caregiver monitoring (OR = 1.10) were most strongly associated with lower‐SER youths’ membership in the resilient versus the vulnerable profile. Results emphasize the need to challenge deficit‐centered frameworks by investigating heterogeneity within profiles of adversity‐exposed youth and identifying context‐specific risk and protective factors.