Can an unpredictable childhood environment enhance working memory? Testing the sensitized-specialization hypothesis.

Although growing up in an adverse childhood environment tends to impair cognitive functions, evolutionary-developmental theory suggests that this might be only one part of the story. A person's mind may instead become developmentally specialized and potentially enhanced for solving problems in the types of environments in which the person grew up. In the current research, we tested whether these specialized advantages in cognitive function might be sensitized to emerge in currently uncertain contexts.

Socioeconomic status, unpredictability, and different perceptions of the same risk.

In this commentary, we address three questions: (1) How might outcomes be affected by the variation in the level of deprivation, rather than the average level of deprivation? (2) Could there be differences in the subjective perception of the same risk as either intrinsic or extrinsic, depending on people's socioeconomic status (SES)? (3) What other psychological mechanisms might play a role in influencing the psychology and behavior of people from deprived backgrounds?

Cognitive adaptations to stressful environments: When childhood adversity enhances adult executive function.

Can growing up in a stressful childhood environment enhance certain cognitive functions? Drawing participants from higher-income and lower-income backgrounds, we tested how adults who grew up in harsh or unpredictable environments fared on 2 types of executive function tasks: inhibition and shifting. People who experienced unpredictable childhoods performed worse at inhibition (overriding dominant responses), but performed better at shifting (efficiently switching between different tasks). This finding is consistent with the notion that shifting, but not inhibition, is especially useful in unpredictable environments.

Sense of control under uncertainty depends on people's childhood environment: a life history theory approach.

Past research found that environmental uncertainty leads people to behave differently depending on their childhood environment. For example, economic uncertainty leads people from poor childhoods to become more impulsive while leading people from wealthy childhoods to become less impulsive. Drawing on life history theory, we examine the psychological mechanism driving such diverging responses to uncertainty.