Contextual Influences on Cognitive and Psychophysiological Mechanisms of Learning in Early Adolescence

Abstract

Learning is a central mechanism through which early experiences shape biological and behavioral development across the lifespan. One type of learning, called reinforcement learning, is posited to support youth’s ability to engage and adapt to their unique worlds with links to long-term social and emotional outcomes. Yet, individual differences in reinforcement learning across diverse environmental and experimental contexts remains poorly characterized in developmental samples. The current dissertation study integrated reinforcement learning and dynamic systems frameworks and drew upon newly adapted methodologies to capture how cognitive and psychophysiological processes of learning are modulated by socioemotional context. In a sample of 56 youth aged 12-15-years-old, this study leveraged a within-person experimental design and quantified continuous behavior and heart rate (~700 observations per system, per person) during an adapted reinforcement learning task with stimuli that varied in socioemotional relevance. Findings revealed that compared to traditionally-used benign or non-emotional stimuli, learning from stimuli high in socioemotional arousal enhanced behavioral performance. The use of computational modeling afforded valuable insights into the differential cognitive processes and strategies youth recruited to achieve such a behavioral advantage, demonstrating that socioemotional salience may have elicited faster value-updating processes and qualitative shifts in more exploitative decision-making. Underlying psychophysiological engagement seemed to be particularly modulated not by socioemotional salience as hypothesized, but by heightened sensitivity to learning from rewards, such that faster value-updating in the context of rewards aligned with more optimal psychophysiological flexibility and organization. Taken together, this study provides an important step in clarifying the contexts and modulatory processes that serve to enhance and support the unique ways youth learn and make decisions. Open questions remain about the adaptive utility of these various patterns of behavior, cognition, and psychophysiology across a variety of learning contexts, how they are shaped by prior lived experiences across development, and how they predict later psychosocial adjustment outcomes. Such work will shed light on how youth learn from–and adapt to–different contextual demands, with the potential to inform programs and policies that support youth’s ability to adjust to their dynamically changing ecologies.