Aside from the content, this project provided a great opportunity to develop my #openscience skills. I created a website containing the full documentation, including a full timeline, analysis scripts, and simulation data (see stefanvermeent.github.io/abcd_ddm/).

Finally, many thanks to my co-authors Ethan Young, Meriah DeJoseph, @annalschubert.bsky.social, & Willem Frankenhuis as well as our funders NWO, JSMF, & NICHD!

Taken together, we conclude that researchers might overestimate the impact of childhood adversity on specific abilities and underestimate the impact on general processing speed and response caution using traditional measures such as RTs.

Strikingly, most task-specific EF abilities were intact (tested using equivalence testing). That is, performance differences did not seem to be driven by differences in youth’s ability to inhibit, shift attention, or mentally rotate.

However, we also found that household threat was associated with more response caution. Thus, children with more household threat tended to be slower because they responded more carefully.

In line with deficit frameworks, household threat, but not material deprivation, was mostly associated with slower task-general processing. In other words, children with more household threat processed information more slowly across all tasks.

Solution #2: After estimating DDM parameters, we used SEM to estimate task-general processes (i.e., shared variance in parameters) and task-specific processes (unique residual variance in parameters). We then estimated associations with adversity.

Solution #1: We used Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Modeling (DDM) to distinguish between three processes: (1) speed of information processing (drift rate), (2) response caution (boundary separation), and (3) speed of task preparations/response execution (non-decision time).

We tried to tackle these issues using data from the #ABCDstudy (N = 10,500). We focused on two types of adversity (household threat and material deprivation) and four cognitive tasks measuring: inhibition, attention shifting, mental rotation, and processing speed.

This could make it seem as if several different abilities are impaired, when in fact only one process is impaired. In addition, general processing deficits could make it harder to detect potential task-specific enhancements.

Problem #2: Performance on any task relies both on unique abilities as well as shared cognitive processes, such as general processing speed. Adversity exposure might disrupt task-general processes, thereby lowering performance across a range of tasks.

However, many other factors can influence performance besides the ability of interest (e.g., inhibition). For example, children from adversity might respond with more caution, making their responses slower.

Problem #1: Task performance (e.g., response time) is often equated with cognitive ability. For example, slower response times on inhibition tasks are sometimes used to conclude that people who have been exposed to adversity tend to be worse at ignoring distractions.

Although these processes are considered complementary, we know little about their integration. Do they operate on different abilities, or could performance on a single task be influenced by both deficit and adaptation processes?

It is well-known that early-life adversity (i.e., prolonged exposure to intense stress) can lower some cognitive functions. However, there is a growing consensus that adversity exposure can also lead to unique strengths through developmental adaptation.