ArticleTopics in cognitive science2024
Interval Timing as a Computational Pathway From Early Life Adversity to Affective Disorders.
Article in Topics in cognitive science, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 9 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neighborhood socioeconomic status and adolescent brain responses to peer feedback: Testing relationships with negative and positive affect assessed outside of the lab.Development and psychopathology · 2026Article
- Anhedonia and Anxious Arousal Are Associated With Distinct Expectations About the Statistics of a Volatile Environment.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- A specific computational role for early-life unpredictability, and not lifelong traumatic experience, in decision-making under uncertainty.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Anhedonia buffers the effects of early-life unpredictability on threat-reward decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neonatal striatal volume is associated with infant anhedonia.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Article
- Article
- Unpredictability is a childhood adversity that contributes to mental health problems.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Addressing Altered Anticipation as a Transdiagnostic Target Through Computational Psychiatry.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Review
- Aberrant neural event segmentation during a continuous social narrative in trauma-exposed older adolescents and young adults.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- The evolving neurobiology of early-life stress.Neuron · 2025Review
- Cognitive Graphs: Representational Substrates for Planning.Decision (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- The causal structure and computational value of narratives.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2024Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
Adverse early life experiences can have remarkably enduring negative consequences on mental health, with numerous, varied psychiatric conditions sharing this developmental origin. Yet, the mechanisms linking adverse experiences to these conditions remain poorly understood. Here, we draw on a principled model of interval timing to propose that statistically optimal adaptation of temporal representations to an unpredictable early life environment can produce key characteristics of anhedonia, a transdiagnostic symptom associated with affective disorders like depression and anxiety. The core observation is that early temporal unpredictability produces broader, more imprecise temporal expectations. As a result, reward anticipation is diminished, and associative learning is slowed. When agents with such representations are later introduced to more stable environments, they demonstrate a negativity bias, responding more to the omission of reward than its receipt. Increased encoding of negative events has been proposed to contribute to disorders with anhedonia as a symptom. We then examined how unpredictability interacts with another form of adversity, low reward availability. We found that unpredictability's effect was most strongly felt in richer environments, potentially leading to categorically different phenotypic expressions. In sum, our formalization suggests a single mechanism can help to link early life adversity to a range of behaviors associated with anhedonia, and offers novel insights into the interactive impacts of multiple adversities.
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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.