My research

Why do people vary in their cognitive control over their impulsive thoughts and actions, and why do such variations in childhood predict important life outcomes? Many theories (including mine) have focused on cognitive control capacities: some of us have a little, some of us have a lot, and these capacity variations remain stable across the lifespan and affect our success in school, work, health, and relationships.

However, in many situations, individuals possess the relevant cognitive control capacity–to inhibit impulsive actions or to juggle information in mind or to flexibly shift from one perspective to another–yet they adaptively elect to not engage that capacity. They weigh factors such as whether cognitive control is likely to pay off. These experiences can shape habits of cognitive control that reduce the effort involved and shape subsequent decisions about whether to engage cognitive control.

This framework provides novel answers to fundamental questions regarding why people vary in cognitive control and why childhood variations predict life outcomes, and it points to novel directions for effectively supporting children and their trajectories. I am currently exploring these ideas through cross-cultural and longitudinal studies, using behavioral and physiological measures, in the context of children’s delay of gratification, planning, and interest in engaging mental effort.

IAS Fellowship

How do children adapt in response to adversity? Can their challenges and strengths later in life be understood in terms of a shortened sensitive period to environmental influences, consistent with an accelerated species-typical shift from exploring options to exploiting them?

Children who experience adversity face later-life challenges with mental and physical health. Such findings are often interpreted in terms of deficits, with adversity reducing children’s capacities to regulate thoughts, actions, and emotions. However, children are highly adaptive. They can adjust in response to environments (e.g., growing up in poverty) in ways that help them navigate those environments. Later in life, they may struggle when their current environment (e.g., a school setting) mismatches their prior environment. Conversely, children may show strengths in contexts that engage adaptations developed based on prior experiences.

This project will test for an accelerated developmental shift from exploration to exploitation in response to early experiences of adversity, as a potential general mechanism to explain wide-ranging effects of adversity. Young children tend to explore a variety of options while older children and adults transition toward exploiting specific and familiar options. Shortening the early period of exploration has been proposed to be an adaptive response to adversity, preparing individuals for earlier independence.

This project will be conducted in collaboration with Willem Frankenhuis and will benefit from and connect with multiple disciplines. The impacts of early adversity are studied across disciplines spanning biological and social sciences, including psychology, education, biology, economics, and sociology. Explore-exploit trade-offs are crucial across domains and levels of analysis including individuals, groups, and species. Relevant methods (e.g., regarding the measurement of adversity, exploration, and associated life outcomes) also draw upon techniques from a variety of disciplines.