ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- How childhood adversity affects components of decision making.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring the impact of unpredictability of household resources on infant attention.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- Loss of pleasure (Anhedonia): A sex-dependent, cross-species consequence of unpredictable signals to the perinatal brain.Neurobiology of stress · 2026Article
- A protocol for the Teen Bugs study: An integrative, multi-omics approach to understanding the role of the gut microbiome and mesocorticolimbic system in adolescent mental health following early adverse caregiving.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Unpredictable caregiving is associated with disrupted neurophysiological measures of attention and autonomic function in three-month-old infants.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Childhood unpredictability, expressive suppression, and mindfulness as predictors of bystanders' outsider behaviors in cyberbullying among Chinese undergraduates: a moderated mediation model.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Unpredictability is a childhood adversity that contributes to mental health problems.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- PICU associated social-emotional adversity in early childhood cancer patients: consequences in neurodevelopment and mental health.Frontiers in oncology · 2026Review
- Sex-Specific Effects of Early-Life Unpredictability on Hippocampal and Amygdala Responses to Novelty in Adolescents.Biological psychiatry global open 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
- Effects of Early Adversity and War Trauma on Learning Under Uncertainty.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Exploration is associated with socioeconomic disparities in learning and academic achievement in adolescence.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Volatility-driven learning in human infants.Science advances · 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
- Quantifying and explaining the rise of fiction.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Information-Seeking in Anxiety.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Strengthening through adversity: The hormesis model in developmental psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2024Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Early in development, the process of exploration helps children gather new information that fosters learning about the world. Yet, it is unclear how childhood experiences may influence the way humans approach new learning. What influences decisions to exploit known, familiar options versus trying a novel alternative? We found that childhood unpredictability, characterized by unpredictable caregiving and unstable living environments, was associated with reduced exploratory behavior. This effect holds while controlling for individual differences, including anxiety and stress. Individuals who perceived their childhoods as unpredictable explored less and were instead more likely to repeat previous choices (habitual responding). They were also more sensitive to uncertainty than to potential rewards, even when the familiar options yielded lower rewards. We examined these effects across multiple task contexts and via both in-person (N = 78) and online replication (N = 84) studies among 10- to 13-y-olds. Results are discussed in terms of the potential cascading effects of unpredictable environments on the development of decision-making and the effects of early experience on subsequent learning.
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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.