Childhood Maltreatment and Explore-Exploit Decision Making in Early Adolescence

• In Event: Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Topic - Parenting & Parent-Child Relationships

Abstract

Study objective
Severe early childhood adversity often leads to a wide range of behavioral problems. This study investigates explore-exploit decision-making as a potential mechanism mediating this link. In uncertain environments, making decisions poses conflicts between staying with a known option (exploitation) versus trying a new, unknown alternative (exploration). Children and adolescents gather information and learn about their environments through sampling and exploration, rather than exploiting existing knowledge. This study examined whether childhood adversity is associated with decreased exploration. Specifically, we hypothesized that parental unpredictability, a dimension of early adversity, may disrupt exploratory decision-making beyond the well-established risk factor of parental harshness.

Methods
We recruited 101 10-13-year-old participants with various exposures to maltreatment based on documented Child Protective Services records. Participants completed a Horizon task (Wilson et al., 2014), a foraging task (Lenow et al., 2017), and a sequential search task (Dale et al., 2018) in counterbalancing orders. Given the presence of many laboratory tasks that purport to measure explore-exploit trade-off, it remains unclear if these tasks measure a single unified construct. Thus, we used three computational tasks with varied structures to capture different aspects of explore-exploit behaviors. We collected information about parental disciplinary behaviors (reflecting harshness) and unpredictability through the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus et al., 1998) and the Questionnaire of Unpredictability in Childhood (Glynn et al., 2018), respectively.

Results
Parental unpredictability associated with reduced overall exploration in the Horizon task (β = -0.032, t(61) = -2.509, p = 0.015), but not the foraging task or the sequential search task, when controlling for parental harshness, working memory, and socio-economic status. Furthermore, parental unpredictability and harshness associated with different exploration strategies in the Horizon task. Children with unpredictable parents had less strategic exploration (β = -0.027, t(61) = -2.033, p = 0.046), meaning that their information search was less future-oriented. Particularly, when facing the trade-off between immediate reward and information, they tended to exploit the rewarding option but forego the informative option, especially when they would have opportunities to use this information in subsequent choices (p = .011, OR = 1.41 (95% CI: 1.08, 1.83)). Children with harsh parents had increased random exploration (β = 1.741, t(60) = 2.131, p = 0.037), suggesting that their choices were more stochastic. Additionally, parental unpredictability, but not parental harshness, associated with fewer mean reward points in horizons task (β = -0.484, t(61) = -2.072, p = 0.042). No associations between parenting measures and reward points were found in the foraging task or the sequential search task.

Conclusions
Children with unpredictable parents are more likely to exploit immediate reward rather than exploring for information that holds the potential to boost long-term utility, and they had less success in gaining rewards. This altered explore-exploit decision-making process may result from an adaptation to the demands of an unpredictable early environment. Yet it implicates impaired learning abilities and problem behaviors later in life that we often see among individuals who experienced high levels of early adversity.

Authors

• Yuyan Xu, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Madeline B Harms, University of Minnesota - Duluth
  Non-Presenting Author

• Robert Wilson
  Non-Presenting Author

• C. Shawn Green, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Author

• Seth David Pollak, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Non-Presenting Author