Three experiments compared cognitive processes in Caucasian nursery school children from different socioeconomic backgrounds who were equated for performance on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. The first demonstrated that children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds experience more difficulty in solving a series of extradimensional and intradimensional shifts than children from high socioeconomic backgrounds. This deficiency was postulated to result from a decreased rate of attentional response acquisition which is offset with experience. The second experiment demonstrated that low socioeconomic status children organize their recall of categorized and non-categorized lists to the same extent as high socioeconomic status children but are less effective in filtering inappropriate items from recall output. The final experiment demonstrated that children could identify stimuli presented via the visual and tactual modes and could make cross modal judgments regarding the equivalence of these stimuli. There were no effects of socioeconomic status on this ability, and extramodal are easier than intramodal judgments. Overall, the results do not support a simple notion of a deficiency of complex cognitive processes in lower class children. (Author/JM)