Associations Between Cognitive Deprivation and Neural Activation During Cognitive Control in Early Childhood: A FMRI Study

• In Event: Taking on Cumulative Stress Models: Neuroimaging Studies from Dimensional/ Interpersonal Neurodevelopmental Processing Perspectives on Adversity

Abstract

Cognitive deprivation is a dimension of adverse childhood experience that involves limited access to cognitive enrichment, including caregiver scaffolding of learning, availability of learning materials, and complex linguistic experiences. Experiences of cognitive deprivation in early childhood are proposed to impact functional development of the frontoparietal control network and regions of the ventral visual stream, which, in turn, alters the course of executive function development (Rosen et al., 2019; Sheridan & McLaughlin, 2016). Despite a theoretical emphasis on the emergence of deprivation-related alterations to neurodevelopment and cognitive control in early childhood, previous research in this area has primarily examined these outcomes in adolescence (Lambert et al., 2017; Mueller et al., 2010). In the present study, we examine associations between cognitive deprivation and neural activation supporting cognitive control in children aged 4 – 8 years. We predicted that cognitive deprivation would be associated with lower accuracy on a cognitive control task and altered activation in the frontoparietal control network and ventral visual stream when accounting for co-occurring adversity, namely threat exposure.
In the present study, 77 children were recruited from the community. The sample was enriched for exposure to structural inequality and, thus, had an increased likelihood of adversity exposure. Deprivation and threat were measured via parent and child report as a part of a larger study of adversity and early childhood neurodevelopment. Cognitive deprivation was operationalized as caregiver report on the StimQ (Dreyer et al., 2009) and threat was operationalized as caregiver report on the Conflict Tactics Scale Parent-Child (Straus, et al., 1995). Children underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging during the Conditioned Appetitive Response Inhibition Task (CARIT; Winter & Sheridan, 2014). The CARIT is a rewarded go/no-go paradigm designed to examine neural recruitment supporting cognitive control broadly, but also inhibitory control in response to previously rewarded (PR) versus neutral (PN) cues. We examined whole brain activation related to cognitive deprivation for No-Go > Go and PR > PN trials controlling for age, sex, and lifetime threat exposure.
Cognitive deprivation was positively associated with activation bilaterally in the lateral occipital cortex during No-Go compared to Go trials (Figure 1) and activation in the right inferior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus during correct PR versus correct PN trials (Figure 2). However, deprivation was not associated with accuracy on No-Go (ß = .02, p = .92) or PR trials (ß = .13, p = .16). Taken together, these findings suggest that children with greater cognitive deprivation may recruit attentional resources that scaffold cognitive control, supported by the ventral visual stream, to a greater extent than children with lower cognitive deprivation, to achieve similar levels of task performance. Moreover, for these children, successful response inhibition in reward-salient contexts was associated with greater recruitment of canonical cognitive control regions in the prefrontal cortex, likely reflecting greater effort. These findings replicate and extend previous observations in adolescence by showing predicted patterns of differential associations between deprivation and neural recruitment supporting cognitive control in early childhood.

Authors

• Lucy Lurie, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  Presenting Author

• Amanda Mitchell, Columbia University

• Maresa A. Tate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Summer Motton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Celina Meyer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Katie McLaughlin, Harvard University

• Margaret A. Sheridan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill