Early adversity and learning: implications for typical and atypical behavioral development
Open accessAbstract
BACKGROUND: Children who experience early adversity often develop emotion regulatory problems, but little is known about the mechanisms that mediate this relation. We tested whether general associative learning processes contribute to associations between adversity, in the form of child maltreatment, and negative behavioral outcomes. METHODS: Eighty-one participants between 12 and 17 years of age were recruited for this study and completed a probabilistic learning Task. Forty-one of these participants had been exposed to physical abuse, a form of early adversity. Forty additional participants without any known history of maltreatment served as a comparison group. All participants (and their parents) also completed portions of the Youth Life Stress Interview to understand adolescent's behavior. We calculated measures of associative learning, and also constructed mathematical models of learning. RESULTS: We found that adolescents exposed to high levels of adversity early in their lives had lower levels of associative learning than comparison adolescents. In addition, we found that impaired associative learning partially explained the higher levels of behavioral problems among youth who suffered early adversity. Using mathematical models, we also found that two components of learning were specifically affected in children exposed to adversity: choice variability and biases in their beliefs about the likelihood of rewards in the environment. CONCLUSIONS: Participants who had been exposed to early adversity were less able than their peers to correctly learn which stimuli were likely to result in reward, even after repeated feedback. These individuals also used information about known rewards in their environments less often. In addition, individuals exposed to adversity made decisions early in the learning process as if rewards were less consistent and occurred more at random. These data suggest one mechanism through which early life experience shapes behavioral development.
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On a probabilistic reward task, reduced reinforcement learning appears in women with childhood sexual abuse and MDD, physically abused adolescents, and young adults with many early-life adversities.
“For example, women with a history of both childhood sexual abuse and MDD (Pechtel and Pizzagalli, 2013), adolescents exposed to physical abuse (Hanson et al., 2017), and young adults who had high levels of various adversities in early life (Birn et al., 2017) demonstrate decreased reinforcement learning.”
From The effects of early life stress on reward processing (2018) · cites this paper as Hanson et al., 2017
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Self-citation
- Authors
- Hanson, J. L., van den Bos, W., Roeber, B. J., Rudolph, K. D., Davidson, R. J., & Pollak, S. D.
- Affiliations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Center for Adaptive Rationality Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin Germany
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
- Corresponding author
- Pollak, Seth D.
- Venue
- Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2017-02-03
- Volume
- 58
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 770-778
- ISSN
- 0021-9630 (ISSN-L)
- 1469-7610
- PMC
- PMC5474156
- OpenAlex
- W2584999836
- Cited by
- 136
- References
- 47
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 19 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 20 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 5
- FWCI
- 14.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of Mental Health (MH61285, MH68858, P50‐MH84051, MH43454)
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA028087)
- Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center
- National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P30‐HD03352)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child Abuse and Trauma
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Child Welfare and Adoption
- Keywords
- childhood adversity, child abuse, physical abuse, associative learning, probabilistic learning, behavioral problems, emotion regulation, adolescents, reward learning, belief bias, choice variability, mathematical model of learning, life events, behavioral development
- MeSH terms
- Problem Behavior, Adolescent, Adolescent Behavior, Association Learning, Child, Child Abuse, Decision Making, Female, Humans, Male, Models, Theoretical, Probability Learning, Reward
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