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Prior work has demonstrated that individuals with a history of early life adversity (ELA) exhibit decreased exploration in decision-making tasks. However, it remains unclear how two important but distinct characteristics of the environment, stimulus novelty and reward uncertainty, play a role in these patterns. Although often confounded in decision-making tasks, recent work suggests that these two components have unique effects on exploratory behaviors, underscoring the importance of decoupling these two motivators of behavior. The current study seeks to elucidate whether decreased exploration following ELA stems primarily from differences in novelty-seeking or uncertainty-avoidant behavior. We plan to recruit a sample of 300 emerging adults (ages 18 to 25 years). Participants will complete a task that decomposes the unique effects of novelty and uncertainty in explore-exploit decision-making. On each trial, participants choose between two stimuli that vary in novelty and reward uncertainty, with the goal of learning which stimulus has the highest mean reward payout in order to obtain the most points. Participants will also complete the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), which includes subscales of abuse and neglect. Participants will also complete the Questionnaire of Unpredictability in Childhood (QUIC), which assesses unpredictability of the caregiving environment during childhood. We will first test whether the previously observed association in which greater ELA (indicated by total scores on the CTQ and total scores on the QUIC) is associated with attenuated exploration replicates in our sample. Building upon prior work, we will additionally investigate how novelty and uncertainty of choice options, two components central to exploratory decision-making, relate to putative ELA-related differences in exploratory behaviors. If the characteristics of the sample allow (i.e., if the distribution of abuse and neglect CTQ subscales across the sample are relatively normal and demonstrate variability in the levels of abuse versus neglect experienced), we will test whether the unique effects of novelty and reward uncertainty on exploration specifically differ based on the type of adversity experienced (i.e., abuse versus neglect). Given the association between exploratory behaviors and mental health, this has implications for functioning in ELA-exposed individuals, who are at heightened risk for developing psychopathology.

Across the lifespan, individuals frequently choose between exploiting known rewarding options or exploring unknown alternatives. A large body of work has suggested that children may explore more than adults. However, because novelty and reward uncertainty are often correlated, it is unclear how they differentially influence decision making across development. Here, children, adolescents, and adults (ages 8 - 27 years, N = 122) completed an adapted version of a recently developed value-guided decision-making task (Cockburn et al., 2021) that decouples novelty and uncertainty. In line with prior studies, we found that exploration decreased with increasing age. Critically, participants of all ages demonstrated a similar bias to select choice options with greater novelty, whereas aversion to reward uncertainty increased into adulthood. Computational modeling of participant choices revealed that whereas adolescents and adults demonstrated attenuated uncertainty aversion for more novel choice options, children did not factor reward uncertainty into their decisions at all.

Prioritizing memory for the information most likely to be useful in the future is critical to learning effectively in our complex world. Previous work has revealed that the ability to strategically encode high-value information may improve gradually over development, as the systems supporting cognitive control processes mature. However, studies of value-directed memory have relied on explicit cues that signal the importance of information, which are rarely present in real-world contexts. Here, we examined whether individuals across age groups could learn the relative frequency of items in their environment and prioritize memory for information associated with higher frequency items, which would ultimately enable them to earn more reward. We found that from childhood to early adulthood, individuals gained the ability to dynamically adjust memory based on the statistics of the environment (Experiment 1). In the absence of any relation between item frequency and the reward that could be earned for encoding related information, the increased exposure to higher frequency items did not facilitate associative memory (Experiment 2). Taken together, results from our two experiments suggest that the use of past experience to prioritize memory for high-value information strengthens with increasing age and is supported by the developing ability to derive explicit knowledge of the structure of the environment from experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).