ArticleDevelopmental science2018
Instrumental learning and cognitive flexibility processes are impaired in children exposed to early life stress.
Article in Developmental science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 120 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Cognitive Control Across the Lifespan: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Prospective Studies.Trauma, violence & abuse · 2025Pooled it
- How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Emotion regulation as mediator between childhood adversity and psychopathology: A meta-analysis.Clinical psychology review · 2022Pooled it
- Early deprivation disruption of associative learning is a developmental pathway to depression and social problems.Nature communications · 2018Trial
- Neurodevelopmental effects of early life stress: PFC and cognition.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Are Adolescents with Higher Openness More Creative Under Stress? The Mediating Role of Stress Perception and Cognitive Flexibility.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Violence and threat exposure is associated with frontostriatal alterations during risky decision-making in children with co-morbid ADHD and disruptive behavior disorders.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Effects of Early Adversity and War Trauma on Learning Under Uncertainty.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Neglect and Neurodevelopment: A Narrative Review Understanding the Link Between Child Neglect and Executive Function Deficits.Biomedicines · 2025Review
- Early life racial/ethnic discrimination effects on behavioral control and health outcomes in young adults.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Instability in the environment and children's in-school self-regulatory behaviors.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Effects of chronic stress on cognitive function - From neurobiology to intervention.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Review
- Witnessing their mother's acute and prolonged stress affects executive functioning in children.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Sensitivity to the Instrumental Value of Choice Increases Across Development.Psychological science · 2024Article
- Longitudinal associations between family functioning and generalized anxiety among adolescents: the mediating role of self-identity and cognitive flexibility.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Threat- and reward-related brain circuitry, perceived stress, and anxiety in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal investigation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Childhood maltreatment influences adult brain structure through its effects on immune, metabolic, and psychosocial factors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Children who experience severe early life stress show persistent deficits in many aspects of cognitive and social adaptation. Early stress might be associated with these broad changes in functioning because it impairs general learning mechanisms. To explore this possibility, we examined whether individuals who experienced abusive caregiving in childhood had difficulties with instrumental learning and/or cognitive flexibility as adolescents. Fifty-three 14-17-year-old adolescents (31 exposed to high levels of childhood stress, 22 control) completed an fMRI task that required them to first learn associations in the environment and then update those pairings. Adolescents with histories of early life stress eventually learned to pair stimuli with both positive and negative outcomes, but did so more slowly than their peers. Furthermore, these stress-exposed adolescents showed markedly impaired cognitive flexibility; they were less able than their peers to update those pairings when the contingencies changed. These learning problems were reflected in abnormal activity in learning- and attention-related brain circuitry. Both altered patterns of learning and neural activation were associated with the severity of lifetime stress that the adolescents had experienced. Taken together, the results of this experiment suggest that basic learning processes are impaired in adolescents exposed to early life stress. These general learning mechanisms may help explain the emergence of social problems observed in these individuals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.