Abstract
Adversity impacts many aspects of psychological and physical development including reward-based learning and decision-making. Mechanisms relating adversity and reward processing in children, however, remain unclear. Here, we show that adversity is associated with potentiated learning from positive outcomes and impulsive decision-making, but unrelated to learning from negative outcomes. We then show via functional magnetic resonance imaging that the link between adversity and reward processing is partially mediated by differences in ventral striatal response to rewards. The findings suggest that early-life adversity is associated with alterations in the brain’s sensitivity to rewards accounting, in part, for the link between adversity and altered reward processing in children.
Highlights
Adversity impacts many aspects of psychological and physical development including reward-based learning and decision-making
These effects appear to extend to humans, as early-life adversity has been associated with elevated levels of striatal dopamine (Egerton et al, 2016; Preussner et al, 2004), and increased striatal dopamine release to rewarding stimuli such as amphetamine (Oswald et al, 2014)
Reward-based learning was assessed by means of the Probabilistic Selection Task (PST), a measure of reinforcement learning which has previously been shown to be sensitive to variation in levels of striatal dopamine (Frank et al, 2004)
Summary
Two studies examined the association between normative variation in early-life adversity and children’s reward-based learning and decision-making. The first focused on associations between adversity and reward-related behaviors; the second focused on neurophysiological mediators of adversity and reward-behavior associations
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