Peer-reviewed article
Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.
Smith KE, Piray P, Teal A, Gok S, Pollak SD ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines how early life stress affects the way children aged 11-16 make decisions about rewards. Children exposed to high stress were more likely to change their choices frequently, expecting environments to be unpredictable. The research used a reward learning task and computational modeling to understand how stress shapes children's learning strategies. The findings suggest that childhood stress influences how children weigh and prioritize new information when making decisions.
Key points
- Children with high stress exposure switched their responses more frequently rather than maintaining effective strategies
- Switching behavior was driven by expectations of environmental volatility rather than other factors
- High stress exposure biases children toward learning strategies suited to unpredictable environments
- Early life stress shapes the development of learning parameters with implications for decision-making
Limitations
The document does not specify the country or countries where the study was conducted, and does not describe the sample size details or demographic characteristics of the 11-16-year-old participants. The mechanisms by which stress produces these changes in decision-making expectations are not fully explained.
Abstract
People learn most effectively when they can flexibly modify strategies to accommodate environmental changes. Here, we explore how chronic early life stress influences the ways individuals weight and prioritize new information when making decisions. To do so, we examined the choices of 11-16-year-old children in a reward learning task. Children varied on their level of stress exposure. We used a Bayesian computational learning model to assess whether differences in children's decision making were driven by difference in their expectations about the task environment. Children with high stress exposure switched their responses rather than maintaining choices that had previously been effective for them when making decisions about rewards. This switching was driven by children with high stress exposure expecting environments to be more volatile. These findings offer insight into how early life experiences can shape the subsequent parameters of human learning. SUMMARY: How experience shapes an individual's ability to flexibly adjust learning strategies when making decisions is not well understood. Using behavioral tasks combined with a novel computational model, we find exposure to high stress environments biases children towards learning strategies optimal to unpredictable environments. Stress in childhood shapes the development of learning parameters in ways that have implications for decision making.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Behavioral reward learning task combined with Bayesian computational learning model to assess decision-making strategies
- Population
- Children aged 11-16 years varying in level of stress exposure
Key finding
Children with high stress exposure switched responses more frequently than those with low stress exposure
KE et al. · Europe PMC · 1 Jul 2026