1-218 - How the Environment Shapes Learning Across Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Children’s core learning systems undergo vast changes across the lifespan: with development, infants and children show improvements in their abilities to learn associations, values, and new information. The present set of papers seeks to understand how these changes unfold in the developing brain across childhood—from infancy to early adulthood—and how children’s environments shape these changes. In a comprehensive set of papers, we reveal specific influences of socioeconomic status (SES) and stress on basic learning systems across the brain.

Paper 1 demonstrates that infants from low SES environments learn differently than children from higher SES environments. This work shows a selective impact of SES on core associative learning systems with lower SES children underperforming higher SES children only when there is no reward. Paper 2 shows that, in early childhood, stress exposure impacts connectivity between ventral tegmental area, a reward region, and hippocampus, with consequences for reward processing and inhibition. Paper 3 explores the impact of learned value on older children’s ability to inhibit a response, showing that learned value impacts the ability to inhibit a response most during adolescence and least during childhood and is related to ongoing change in the prefrontal cortex. Finally, paper 4 shows that anterior hippocampus may play a mechanistic role in mediating SES-related discrepancies in cognition. Together, these findings reveal environmental influences on the development of core learning systems from infancy to early adulthood.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chairs

• Amy S Finn, University of Toronto

• Allyson Mackey, University of Pennsylvania

Individual Presentations

• Differential impact of Socioeconomic Status on Associative and Reward Learning in Infancy - Presenting Author: Kristen Tummeltshammer, Brown University; Non-Presenting Author: Dima Amso, Brown University

• Stress effects on reward circuitry in early childhood - Presenting Author: Anne T. Park, University of Pennsylvania; Non-Presenting Author: Allyson Mackey, University of Pennsylvania

• Development of Prefrontal Cortical Connectivity and the Enduring Effect of Learned Value on Cognitive Control - Presenting Author: Juliet Davidow, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Margaret Sheridan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Koene R.A. Van Dijk, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Rosario Santillana, UC Davis; Non-Presenting Author: Jenna Snyder, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Non-Presenting Author: Constanza Vidal Bustamante, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Bruce Rosen, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Leah H. Somerville, Harvard University

• Parental Income Alters Development of Anterior, but not Posterior, Hippocampus - Presenting Author: Alexandra Lee Decker, The University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Katherine D. Duncan, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Amy S Finn, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Donald Mabbott, University of Toronto