Experiential Stress and Higher-Order Cognition: Enemy or Adaptive Organizer?

• In Event: 1-087 - Connecting environmental experience to the emergence of self-regulation: Insights from typical and atypical populations

Integrative Statement

Children growing up in the context of economic adversity can face a litany of experiential stressors that can undermine their emerging capacities to regulate their thoughts and attention. Typically, referred to as executive functions (EF), these abilities support children’s burgeoning academic and social skills and successful transition to formal schooling. As such, there is a reasonable tendency to equate stronger EF as being 'better’ for learning.
Notably, Life History models highlight the idea that many complex developmental phenomena are often more about adaptive trade-offs than they are about clear-cut deficits (e.g. Ellis et al., 2009). From this perspective, ‘better’ learning is reframed as a relative question: ‘better,' to what end? For example, we know that EF deficits can undermine learning that requires organizing and integrating new and existing information (e.g., Willoughby et al., 2012)—skills that are quite useful in stable, predictable contexts. Yet, there is increasing reason to suspect that such top-down control may also bias thinking toward known heuristics and, thus, away from richer sets of cognitive alternatives (e.g., Chrysikou et al., 2014; Gopnik et al., 2017). As such, EF may provide an incredibly useful tool for efficiently building upon what we know, yet come at the cost of increasing inflexibility in our receptiveness to novel information and alternative ways of thinking. This latter ‘flexible’ cognition is fundamental to inductive reasoning, creative thinking, and implicit/conventional learning—abilities that that are quite adaptive in unpredictable environments that require rapid, qualitative shifts in thinking.
The aim of our study was to begin testing some of these ideas. Specifically, in a series of experiments with 4 to 6 year olds, we are testing whether acute experiential stress simultaneously undermines EF, yet supports more flexible use of novel information.
Although we are still collecting data, our preliminary results are consistent with these hypotheses. Specifically, we randomly assigned children (N = 30) to either a treatment condition in which they received a social stress paradigm (Children's Reactions to Evaluation Stress Test (CREST); de Weerth et al., 2012) or a non-stressful control version of the task. We then conducted a series of EF and ‘cognitive flexibility’ tasks. The former included increasingly difficult versions of the Flanker Fish task. The latter included two tasks: (1) a ‘functional fixedness/flexibility’ task that requires children to solve a problem by using an object with a known function in a novel way, and (2) Gopnik and Sobel’s (2000) ‘Blicket’ task, which taps real-time inductive learning.
Measures of autonomic and adrenocortical functioning (e.g., RSA, cortisol) indicated that those exposed to the treatment showed the expected stress response (Figure 1). Those in the treatment also showed worse EF performance—albeit, only for the most difficult block of the EF task. Notably, children in the stress treatment showed better inductive reasoning and more flexibility in the tool use, compared to controls. Although preliminary, we discuss our findings in the context of potential trade-offs between EF and different modes of learning, and the relevance of these trade-offs to Life History models of development.

Authors

• Dan Berry, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Keira B. Leneman, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alyssa R Palmer, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lexus Jade Aksteter, University of Minnesota
  Non-Presenting Author