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A. Gopnik. (2019). Life history, love and learning: Commentary on Tottenham et al. Nature Human Behaviour, News and Views. doi:?10.1038/s41562-019-0673-8Subject Strapline: Developmental psychologyPsychology; Life history, love and learningAlison Gopnik, Department of Psychology2121 Berkeley Way, Room 3302Berkeley, CA 94720-1650gopnik@berkeley.eduStandfirst: Classic avoidance learning leads to a dilemma – if an animal always avoids a cue that lead to a negative outcome it will never learn anything new about the cue and outcome. A new study suggests that a protected childhood period helps resolve that dilemma – children actually prefer to explore aversive cues but only do so if a parent is present. Why does childhood exist? Why do so many animals begin their lives with a period of helpless immaturity, a period when caring adults must look after them? And why do human beings, in particular, have such a long childhood, twice as long as our nearest primate relatives? A new paper by Tottenham et al 1 (this issue) suggests an intriguing answer. In the study, when children saw that a particular shape led to an unpleasant noise, they were actually more likely to go down a tunnel marked with that shape, rather than avoiding it. But they only did this when a parent was present. The presence of a caregiver signaled that it was OK to take risks in order to learn something new. The evolutionary combination of an immature risk-taking child and a protective caregiver may be designed to encourage learning.The study takes off from one of the oldest, most canonical findings in all of psychology, dating back to the very beginnings of the discipline in the early 1900’s2. Put a rat in a maze with two arms marked with different cues and shock it when it goes down one arm and not the other. As we all know, the rat quickly learns to avoid the cue that leads to shock and won’t venture down that arm of the maze. This very fundamental kind of learning is obviously adaptive and important. But it has a downside. Suppose the shock goes away. The rat will never learn that the arm has become safe, because it will never venture down it once it has experienced the shock. In fact, something like this may be at the root of anxiety disorders like phobias or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. One really bad experience on an airplane, for instance, might lead you to avoid flying altogether, and so never learn that that experience was exceptional. The best cure, counterintuitively, is to repeatedly expose the anxious person to the terrifying cue, demonstrating that it really doesn’t lead to disaster, after all. This is a good example of what neuroscientists and computer scientists call an explore-exploit tradeoff. Exploration is risky in the short term, but it may have long-term benefits, especially in a complex and changeable environment. How do you resolve the tension between the risk that the cue will lead to shock, and the useful information you will acquire about whether it consistently leads to shock or not? Childhood is, at least in part, a way of resolving that tension. Childhood gives an animal a space to explore – a period in which it doesn’t need to worry about risks and rewards. Moms and other caregivers take care of that. As a result, young animals, including humans, can be impulsive and adventurous in the service of learning. 3 In earlier research, Moriceau and Sullivan (one of the authors of the current study)? discovered a striking fact 4. They gave old and young rats the classic avoidance learning tasks. Surprisingly, young rats would actually explore the negative arm of the maze more than the positive arm. The negative cue had led to a shock. But, unlike the other cue, it had also led to new information. The young rats, unlike the older rats, preferred information to utility. But, significantly, they only did this when their mother was present. The attachment between the young rats and their mothers played a crucial role in allowing the rats to explore. At least implicitly, the rats seemed to assume that the mother’s presence ensured that they would not come to harm.Would this also be true for human children? There are, of course, many differences between the two species – human behavior is much more complex and rats are mature within a few weeks rather than many years. Tottenham et al. designed an ingenious version of the classic task to use with 3-5 year old preschoolers. First, the children pushed a button when one particular shape appeared and then heard an unpleasant loud noise, when another shape appeared and they pushed the button, nothing happened. Sometimes a parent was present, sometimes the parent was absent. Then the parent left, and the children saw a child-sized pair of tunnels, each marked with one of the cues. They were told that there was a prize at the end of both tunnels. Very much like the young rats the children actually sought out the aversive cue, they tended to go down the tunnel that was marked with the negative shape. But they only did this if a parent had been present in the first part of the experiment. When the parent had been absent, they actively avoided the cue that was associated with the noise. Moreover, Tottenham et al showed that the children attended to the cue differently when the parent was present or absent. When the parent was present the children actively paid attention to the aversive cue – when the parent was absent, they paid more attention to the other, unthreatening, cue.The authors suggest that the result may partly be due to the fact that children develop an attraction to anything that is associated with a caregiver, even intrinsically repulsive things like loud noises. It may be true that children and rats develop these preferences (it’s a heart-breaking feature of child abuse cases). But that can’t be the whole story because in these experiments the parent was equally associated with both cues – so you would expect the child to be indifferent between them. Instead, the presence of the parent led the children to actively prefer the risky cue.John Bowlby, one of the founders of attachment theory, speculated long ago that early attachment and exploration were closely linked, and these studies bear out that idea. But it also fits with more recent work on “life history” in biology. Across a remarkably wide range of species, a long childhood with protective caregivers goes with a large brain and a capacity for plasticity and learning 5. Care conquers fear: Love lets us learn.ReferencesTottenham et al. (current issue). Parental presence switches avoidance to attraction learning in children.Watson, J. B. (1916), The place of the conditioned reflex in psychology. Psychological Review?23(2):89-116.Gopnik et al. (2017). Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,?114(30), 7892-7899. Moriceau, S. & Sullivan, R. (2006). Maternal presence serves as a switch between learning fear and attraction in infancy, Nature Neuroscience?9,?1004–1006?Snell-Rood, E. (2013). An overview of the evolutionary causes and consequences of behavioural plasticity. Animal Behaviour, 85, 5, May 2013, Pages 1004-1011Competing InterestsThe author declares no competing interests ................
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