Working for the future: parentally deprived Nigerian Children have enhanced working memory ability

Abstract

Background: The dominant view based on the deficit model of developmental psychopathology is that early adverse rearing impairs cognition. In contrast, an emerging evolutionary-developmental model argues that individuals exposed to early-life stress may have improved cognitive abilities that are adapted to harsh environments. We set out to test this hypothesis by examining cognitive functions in parentally deprived children in Nigeria. Methods: Cognitive performance was compared between 53 deprived children who currently live in institutional homes and foster families and 51 nondeprived control participants. We used a multifaceted neurocognitive test battery for the assessment of inhibition, set-shifting and working memory. Results: Results showed that the deprived and nondeprived group did not significantly differ in their performance on set-shifting and inhibition tasks. Conversely, the deprived group performed significantly better than the nondeprived group in the working memory task. Discussion: We interpret the enhanced working memory ability of the deprived group as a correlate of its ecological relevance. In Nigeria, underprivileged children may need to rely to a larger extent on working memory abilities to attain success through academic work. This study provides further evidence that exposure to early adversity does not necessarily impair cognitive functions but can even enhance it under some conditions and in some domains.

Adaptation in the face of adversity: Decrements and enhancements in children's cognitive control behavior following early caregiving instability

“…to alterations in reward processing (Dillon et al, 2009;Guyer et al, 2006;Harms et al, 2019), perhaps due to less positive parenting (Hanson et al, 2017;McCrory et al, 2017) and hypervigilance to threat (Teicher & Samson, 2016) -experiences which may be more directly linked to growing up in a dangerous environment. Additional recent work has also observed that behavioral enhancements occurred only within a domain posited as relevant to the specific population (Nweze et al, 2020), with no group differences noted in task switching behavior. Taken together, this work highlights the importance of capturing not only the type but also the characteristics of the caregiving environment when disentangling the developmental consequences of early adversity.…”

Cognition and action: a latent variable approach to study contributions of executive functions to motor control in older adults

“…Executive function assessment followed the protocol of Friedman and colleagues, with minor modifications [37]. Inhibition, shifting, and updating were each examined by three well-established and validated tasks (inhibition: antisaccade task (AT) [37][38][39][40], number-Stroop task (NST) [37,[41][42][43], stop-signal task (SST) [37,39,44,45]; shifting: category-switch task (CAST)…”

“…The scale "work" ("household") applies to young adults (older adults) only. [37,39,54,55], color-shape task (COST) [37,39,42,56], number-letter task (NLT) [37,39,57]; updating: digit-span task (DST) [42,58], keep track task (KTT) [37,39,59], spatial 2-back task (STT) [37,39,60]; see Supplementary Materials for details on timing and trial numbers). Neuropsychological tasks were programmed and controlled by OpenSesame version 3.2.6 [61].…”

What is an adaptive pattern of brain network coupling for a child? It depends on their environment

“…While poverty status tends to be associated with a higher likelihood of particular experiences, such as racial or ethnic discrimination, more crowding in the home and financial strain, unsafe neighborhoods, and underfunded public schools, there is large variation in the experiences of children who live in poverty (DeJoseph et al, 2020). Moreover, experiences that are on average associated with worse cognitive outcomes (such as being deprived of caregiver support in early life) can, under some circumstances, produce better cognitive outcomes (Nweze et al, 2020), suggesting there may be different routes to achieving high cognitive performance in these cases. Thus, we predicted that differences in environmental influences among children in poverty would explain whether strong LFPN-DMN connectivity was adaptive or maladaptive for cognitive test performance.…”