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Early-life stress is associated with a preponderance of habitual responding in a novel instrumental avoidance learning paradigm.

ABSTRACT: There is substantial evidence linking early-life stress (ELS) to negative health outcomes in adulthood, including addiction. However, the neurocognitive and behavioral mechanisms through which ELS increases these risks remain unclear. To address this gap in knowledge, we developed a novel instrumental learning paradigm to explore the effects of ELS on the balance of habitual versus goal-directed learning. Habits efficiently reproduce repetitive behaviors but are inflexible whenreward contingencies related to those behaviors change. Persisting in performing a response after its outcome has been devalued is the hallmark of habitual behavior in instrumental learning. Participants with a history of higher ELS were significantly more likely to make habitual responses in this instrumental avoidance learning paradigm than individuals with a history of lower ELS. Logistic regression analysis showed that ELS is significantly related to habitual responding over and above the effects of retrospective socioeconomic status, trait and state anxiety, depression and recent levels of stress. Analysis of the differential impacts of the type of ELS suggested that these effects are largely driven by experiences of physical neglect.

SUBMITTER: Gordon AL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7683304 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Early-life stress is associated with a preponderance of habitual responding in a novel instrumental avoidance learning paradigm.

Gordon Alexander L AL Patterson Tara K TK Knowlton Barbara J BJ

Neurobiology of learning and memory 20201001

There is substantial evidence linking early-life stress (ELS) to negative health outcomes in adulthood, including addiction. However, the neurocognitive and behavioral mechanisms through which ELS increases these risks remain unclear. To address this gap in knowledge, we developed a novel instrumental learning paradigm to explore the effects of ELS on the balance of habitual versus goal-directed learning. Habits efficiently reproduce repetitive behaviors but are inflexible whenreward contingenci ...[more]

PMID: 33011387

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Project description:Individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are characterized by atypicalities in social interactions, compared to Typically Developing individuals (TD). The social motivation theory posits that these difficulties stem from diminished anticipation, reception, and/or learning from social rewards. Although learning from socioemotional outcomes is core to the theory, studies to date have been sparse and inconsistent. This possibly arises from a combination of theoretical, methodological and sample-related issues. Here, we assessed participants' ability to develop a spontaneous preference for actions that lead to desirable socioemotional outcomes (approaching/avoiding of happy/angry individuals, respectively), in an ecologically valid social scenario. We expected that learning abilities would be impaired in ASC individuals, particularly in response to affiliative social feedback. We ran an online social reinforcement learning task, on two large online cohorts with (n = 274) and without (n = 290) ASC, matched for gender, age and education. Participants had to indicate where they would sit in a waiting room. Each seat was associated with different probabilities of approaching/avoiding emotional individuals. Importantly, the task was implicit, as participants were not instructed to learn, and emotional expressions were never mentioned. We applied both categorical analyses contrasting the ASC and TD groups and dimensional factor analysis on affective questionnaires. Contrary to our hypothesis, participants showed spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes, regardless of their diagnostic group. Yet, when accounting for dimensional variations in autistic traits, as well as depression and anxiety, two main findings emerged among females who failed to develop explicit learning strategies: (1) autism severity in ASC correlated with reduced learning to approach happy individuals; (2) anxiety-depression severity across both ASC and TD participants correlated with reduced learning to approach/avoid happy/angry individuals, respectively. Implicit spontaneous learning from socioemotional outcomes is not generally impaired in autism but may be specifically associated with autism severity in females with ASC, when they do not have an explicit strategy for adapting to their social environment. Clinical diagnosis and intervention ought to take into account individual differences in their full complexity, including the presence of co-morbid anxiety and depression, when dealing with social atypicalities in autism.

Project description:The effect of stress on the balance between goal-directed behavior and stimulus-response habits has been demonstrated in a number of studies, but the extent to which stressful events that occur during development affect the balance between these systems later in life is less clear. Here, we examined whether individuals with a history of early-life stress (ELS) show a bias toward avoidance habits on an instrumental learning task as adults. Participants (N = 189 in Experiment 1 and N = 112 in Experiment 2) were undergraduate students at the University of California, Los Angeles. In Experiment 1, we hypothesized that a history of ELS and a longer training phase would be associated with greater avoidance habits. Participants learned to make button-press responses to visual stimuli in order to avoid aversive auditory outcomes. Following a training phase involving extensive practice of the responses, participants were tested for habitual responding using outcome devaluation. After completing the instrumental learning task, participants provided retrospective reports of stressful events they experienced during their first 16 years of life. We did not observe evidence for an effect of the length of training, but we did observe an effect of ELS, with greater stress predicting greater odds of performing the avoidance habit. In Experiment 2, we sought to replicate the effect of ELS observed in Experiment 1, and we also tested whether the presence of distraction during training would increase avoidance habit performance. We replicated the effect of ELS but we did not observe evidence of an effect of distraction. Taken together, these data lend support to the hypothesis that stress occurring during development can have lasting effects on the balance between goal-directed behavior and stimulus-response habits in humans. Enhancement of avoidance habits may help explain the higher levels of negative health outcomes such as heart and liver disease that have been observed in individuals with a history of ELS. Some of the negative health behaviors that contribute to these negative health outcomes, e.g., overeating and substance use, may be performed initially to avoid feelings of distress and then transition to being performed habitually.

Project description:Early-life stress (ELS) or adversity, particularly in the form of childhood neglect and abuse, is associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes in adulthood. However, whether these relationships are mediated by the consequences of ELS itself or by other exposures that frequently co-occur with ELS is unclear. To address this question, we carried out a longitudinal study in rats to isolate the effects of ELS on regional brain volumes and behavioral phenotypes relevant to anxiety and depression. We used the repeated maternal separation (RMS) model of chronic ELS, and conducted behavioral measurements throughout adulthood, including of probabilistic reversal learning (PRL), responding on a progressive ratio task, sucrose preference, novelty preference, novelty reactivity, and putative anxiety-like behavior on the elevated plus maze. Our behavioral assessment was combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for quantitation of regional brain volumes at three time points: immediately following RMS, young adulthood without further stress, and late adulthood with further stress. We found that RMS caused long-lasting, sexually dimorphic biased responding to negative feedback on the PRL task. RMS also slowed response time on the PRL task, but without this directly impacting task performance. RMS animals were also uniquely sensitive to a second stressor, which disproportionately impaired their performance and slowed their responding on the PRL task. MRI at the time of the adult stress revealed a larger amygdala volume in RMS animals compared with controls. These behavioral and neurobiological effects persisted well into adulthood despite a lack of effects on conventional tests of 'depression-like' and 'anxiety-like' behavior, and a lack of any evidence of anhedonia. Our findings indicate that ELS has long-lasting cognitive and neurobehavioral effects that interact with stress in adulthood and may have relevance for understanding the etiology of anxiety and depression in humans.

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Early-life stress is associated with a preponderance of habitual responding in a novel instrumental avoidance learning paradigm.

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Early-life stress is associated with a preponderance of habitual responding in a novel instrumental avoidance learning paradigm.

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