Reward
Do everyday childhood adversities change how kids learn from rewards?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Children who had faced more ordinary adverse life events learned faster from rewards, chose more impulsively, and showed ventral striatal reward responses that partly accounted for their faster reward learning.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Two correlational studies: behavioural reward-learning and delay-discounting tasks (Study 1), then an fMRI reinforcement-learning task with region-of-interest mediation analysis (Study 2).
- N
- Study 1: 40 children aged 9 to 12. Study 2 (fMRI): 26 children after 18 were removed for head motion; 12 children took part in both.
- Population
- Typically developing children aged 9 to 12 in London, Ontario, excluding those with trauma or developmental, neurological or psychiatric disorders
- Outcome
- Model-estimated learning rates for gains and losses, delay-discounting rate, and ventral striatum and vmPFC responses to gains
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Key findings
More adversity went with faster learning from rewards (r = 0.547) but not from losses, and with steeper discounting of delayed rewards (r = 0.35), with no age effects. In the scanner, adversity again predicted the learning rate for gains (r = 0.40) but not losses. Left ventral striatum and vmPFC responded to gains, and their gain responses predicted gain learning rates; only the left ventral striatal response partially mediated the link between adversity and reward learning.
Methodology
Parents rated how often and how intensely their child had experienced normative adverse events such as moving house, changing schools or losing a grandparent. In Study 1, 40 children did a probabilistic learning task (to estimate how quickly they learned from wins versus losses) and a choice task between smaller immediate and larger delayed money. In Study 2, 26 children did a points-based win/lose learning game during fMRI, and the researchers measured responses to gains and losses in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Limitations
The design is correlational, so it cannot show that adversity causes changes in the reward system; other family or genetic factors could drive both. Samples were small, 18 scanned children were dropped for motion, and the adversity questionnaire (parent-reported and not yet validated against standard measures) captures only normative events. Pubertal status was not measured, and the dopamine interpretation is inferred from fMRI rather than measured directly.
How this study connects
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