ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Individuals with adverse childhood experiences explore less and underweight reward feedback.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 63 citations in OpenAlex.
- How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Aberrant functional connectivity of the globus pallidus in the modulation of the relationship between childhood trauma and major depressive disorder.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPNTrial
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Structural stressors, neurocognition in reward-related decision making and substance use risk in Puerto Rican early adolescents at two sites: study design.Frontiers in public health · 2026Observational
- Question asking practice fosters aspects of curiosity in science content in young children.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Behavioural public policy should take the psychology of poverty into account.Communications psychology · 2025Review
- Cyber victimization experience, uncertainty stress, and internet self-efficacy as predictors of negative bystander behavior in cyberbullying among adolescents: a moderated mediation model.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Effects of Early Adversity and War Trauma on Learning Under Uncertainty.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- Adverse childhood experiences and post-traumatic stress impacts on brain connectivity and alcohol use in adolescence.Child neuropsychology : a journal on normal and abnormal development in childhood and adolescence · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Childhood maltreatment is associated with lower exploration and disrupted prefrontal activity and connectivity during reward learning in volatile environments.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Article
- Directed exploration is reduced by an aversive interoceptive state induction in healthy individuals but not in those with affective disorders.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Meta-Analysis Reveals That Explore-Exploit Decisions are Dissociable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior Insula, and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- The influence of exposure to early-life adversity on agency-modulated reinforcement learning.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- The mediating role of frequent mental distress in the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and cognitive disability in emerging adults.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are extreme stressors that lead to negative psychosocial outcomes in adulthood. Nonhuman animals explore less after exposure to early stress. Therefore, in this preregistered study, we hypothesized that reduced exploration following ACEs would also be evident in human adults. Further, we predicted that adults with ACEs, in a foraging task, would adopt a decision-making policy that relies on the most-recent reward feedback, a rational strategy for unstable environments. We analyzed data from 145 adult participants, 47 with four or more ACEs and 98 with fewer than four ACEs. In the foraging task, participants evaluated the trade-off between exploiting a known patch with diminishing rewards and exploring a novel one with a fresh distribution of rewards. Using computational modeling, we quantified the degree to which participants' decisions weighted recent feedback. As predicted, participants with ACEs explored less. However, contrary to our hypothesis, they underweighted recent feedback. These unexpected findings indicate that early adversity may dampen reward sensitivity. Our results may help to identify cognitive mechanisms that link childhood trauma to the onset of psychopathology.
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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.