Developmental shifts in computations used to detect environmental controllability

Abstract

Accurate assessment of environmental controllability enables individuals to adaptively adjust their behavior—exploiting rewards when desirable outcomes are contingent upon their actions and minimizing costly deliberation when their actions are inconsequential. However, it remains unclear how estimation of environmental controllability changes from childhood to adulthood. Ninety participants (ages 8–25) completed a task that covertly alternated between controllable and uncontrollable conditions, requiring them to explore different actions to discover the current degree of environmental controllability. We found that while children were able to distinguish controllable and uncontrollable conditions, accuracy of controllability assessments improved with age. Computational modeling revealed that whereas younger participants’ controllability assessments relied on evidence gleaned through random exploration, older participants more effectively recruited their task structure knowledge to make highly informative interventions. Age-related improvements in working memory mediated this qualitative shift toward increased use of an inferential strategy. Collectively, these findings reveal an age-related shift in the cognitive processes engaged to assess environmental controllability. Improved detection of environmental controllability may foster increasingly adaptive behavior over development by revealing when actions can be leveraged for one’s benefit.

Reward-motivated memories influence new learning across development

“…Individuals diagnosed with a learning, anxiety, and/or mood disorder, or consumers of medications that influence the nervous system, were ineligible to participate. The target sample size was consistent with prior studies detecting a significant age-related change in goal-directed behavior (e.g., Decker et al 2015 ; Insel et al 2017 , 2019 ; Insel and Somerville 2018 ; Katzman and Hartley 2020 ; Raab et al 2022 ). In accordance with the National Institutes of Health Policy on Reporting Race and Ethnicity Data, our final sample self-identified as 25% Asian, 12% Black/African American, 38% Caucasian/White, 24% mixed race, and <2% Native American.…”

Environmental uncertainty and the advantage of impulsive choice strategies

“…There is a growing literature on how experience in resource-poor environments and earlylife stress can lead to changes in decision-making behavior and to favoring immediate over future rewards [98][99][100][101][102][103], which suggests impulsive choice behavior might be an adaptation to environmental instability. Furthermore, accurate assessment of environmental controllability has been shown to improve with development and age, suggesting that some impulsive choice behavior might arise from a dysfunction during development [104]. Although impulsivity is often assumed to be a trait, it may be a state, perhaps slowly changing, and impulsive choice behavior might reflect the environment to which an agent has adapted.…”

Characterizing experiential elements of early-life stress to inform resilience: Buffering effects of controllability and predictability and the importance of their timing

“…Since the present study relied on cross-sectional, retrospective reports of exposure to traumatic stress across the lifespan, it is possible that participants’ capacity to accurately recollect and document the degree to which exposures were characterized by specific features (i.e., endorsement of a stressor as either controllable or predictable) is related to the developmental time period during which that stressor occurred (with participants experiencing more difficulty reporting on earlier stressors that occurred during infancy and toddlerhood, e.g., (Williams, 1994). This effect is likely to be further exacerbated by developmental shifts in perceptions of specific features of stressors (e.g., Raab et al, 2022). These limitations are reflective of the known issues with retrospective reports in the sphere of traumatic stress assessment (Baldwin et al, 2019; Brewin et al, 1993; Hardt & Rutter, 2004).…”

“…Accordingly, though the ability to exert control over a stressor may buffer the impact of stress exposure across the life course, cross-species empirical evidence suggests that exposure to controllable stress may be particularly impactful during adolescence (Gamble, 1994; Kubala et al, 2012; Raab et al, 2022). Adolescence is characterized by increased plasticity (Larsen & Luna, 2018; Sisk & Gee, 2022; Sydnor et al, 2021), dramatic change in frontostriatal-amygdala circuitry, and, relatedly, motivated behavior (Casey et al, 2019; Herting et al, 2018; Luna et al, 2015; Silvers et al, 2017; van Duijvenvoorde et al, 2016).…”