Protocol and preregistration for the CODEC project: measuring, modelling and mechanistically understanding the nature of cognitive variability in early childhood.

Background: Children's cognitive performance fluctuates across multiple timescales. However, fluctuations have often been neglected in favour of research into average cognitive performance, limiting the unique insights into cognitive abilities and development that cognitive variability may afford. Preliminary evidence suggests that greater variability is associated with increased symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, and differences in behavioural and neural functioning.

What's in a name: The role of verbalization in reinforcement learning.

(e.g., characters or fractals) and concrete stimuli (e.

Test-retest reliability of reinforcement learning parameters.

It has recently been suggested that parameter estimates of computational models can be used to understand individual differences at the process level. One area of research in which this approach, called computational phenotyping, has taken hold is computational psychiatry. One requirement for successful computational phenotyping is that behavior and parameters are stable over time.

Impaired learning to dissociate advantageous and disadvantageous risky choices in adolescents.

Adolescence is characterized by a surge in maladaptive risk-taking behaviors, but whether and how this relates to developmental changes in experience-based learning is largely unknown. In this preregistered study, we addressed this issue using a novel task that allowed us to separate the learning-driven optimization of risky choice behavior over time from overall risk-taking tendencies. Adolescents (12-17 years old) learned to dissociate advantageous from disadvantageous risky choices less well than adults (20-35 years old), and this impairment was stronger in early than mid-late adolescents.

Attachment Representations in Children with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in children is associated with several adverse family characteristics, such as higher parenting stress, more conflicted parent-child relationships, lower parental competence, and higher levels of parental psychopathology. Hence, children with ADHD more often grow up under suboptimal circumstances, which may impact the development of their attachment representations. Here, we investigated whether children with ADHD have more insecure and disorganized attachment representations than their typically developing peers, and which factors could explain this association.

Effects of advice on experienced-based learning in adolescents and adults.

Recent studies that compared effects of pre-learning advice on experience-based learning in adolescents and adults have yielded mixed results. Previous studies on this topic used choice tasks in which age-related differences in advice-related learning bias and exploratory choice behavior are difficult to dissociate. Moreover, these studies did not examine whether effects of advice depend on working memory load.

Uncertainty-driven regulation of learning and exploration in adolescents: A computational account.

Healthy adults flexibly adapt their learning strategies to ongoing changes in uncertainty, a key feature of adaptive behaviour. However, the developmental trajectory of this ability is yet unknown, as developmental studies have not incorporated trial-to-trial variation in uncertainty in their analyses or models. To address this issue, we compared adolescents' and adults' trial-to-trial dynamics of uncertainty, learning rate, and exploration in two tasks that assess learning in noisy but otherwise stable environments.