Early education intervention has long-lasting, positive effects on social behavior, scientists say: Adults who received early life, intensive childhood educational intervention display high levels of fairness in social interactions more than 40 years later, even if being fair comes at a high personal cost, according to Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists.
Article ID:
704142
Released:
16-Nov-2018 12:05 PM EST
Source Newsroom:
Virginia Tech
-
Credit: VTCRI
New
research published in in Nature Communications, led by Read Montague
(left) of the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, suggests that
participants who received educational interventions in early childhood
show positive effects on social decision-making more than four decades
later. Yi Luo (second from left), is the first author of the research
study and a postdoctoral associate at the VTCRI. Sébastien Hétu (third
from left), is the co-first author who is now is now an assistant
professor at the University of Montreal. Terry Lohrenz is a VTCRI
research assistant professor and member of the VTCRI Human Neuroimaging
Laboratory and Computational Psychiatry Unit.
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CITATIONS
Nature Communications, Nov 20, 2018
Newswise — Adults who had received early life,
intensive childhood educational intervention display high levels of
fairness in social interactions more than 40 years later, even when
being fair comes at a high personal cost, according to a new study by
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists.
In today’s (11 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20)
Nature Communications,
researchers describe how they asked 78 participants from the
Abecedarian Project, one of the longest running randomized controlled
studies of the effects of early childhood education in low-income
families, to participate in economic games measuring social norm
enforcement and future planning during social decision-making. An
additional 252 participants who did not receive any childhood
intervention were recruited to serve as a control group.
The
Abecedarian Project is a scientific study originally developed and led
by Craig Ramey, formerly of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and now a professor and distinguished research scholar at the
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and a professor in the
Virginia Tech Department of Psychology in the College of Science. The
Abecedarian researchers investigated whether an intensive early
childhood educational intervention could produce significant benefits in
language and learning in disadvantaged children.
The new research
in Nature Communications, led by corresponding author Read Montague,
who directs the VTCRI Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the VTCRI
Computational Psychiatry Unit, suggests that participants who received
intensive educational interventions in early childhood show positive
effects on social decision-making more than four decades later. The
research involved Ramey and an international group of scientists.
Participants
were invited to take part in an economic game to split $20. One player
decides how to split the money. The research participants could either
accept the amount proposed, or reject it, in which case no one receives
any money. Receiving unequal offers sets up a context in which they have
to make trade-offs between self-interest and the enforcement of social
norms of equality.
Abecedarian players who received intensive,
five-year educational intervention including cognitive and social
stimulation when they were young children in the 1970s strongly rejected
unequal division of money across players, even if it meant they would
miss out on hefty financial gains themselves.
“When someone
rejects an offer, they are sending a very strong signal to the other
player about the decision regarding how the money should be divided,”
said Sébastien Hétu, co-first author of the study, who was a
postdoctoral associate in the Montague laboratory at VTCRI when the
research was conducted and is now an assistant professor at the
University of Montreal. “People who received educational training
through the Abecedarian Project were inclined to accept generally equal
offers, but would reject disadvantageous and advantageous offers, in
effect punishing transgressions that they judged to be outside of the
social norm of equality.”
In addition, using computational
modeling, the researchers discovered differences in social
decision-making strategies. For example, participants who received
educational interventions planned further into the future in another
economic game.
“The participants who received early educational
interventions were very sensitive to inequality, whether it was to their
advantage or disadvantage. Our results also suggest that they placed
more value in the long-term benefits of promoting social norms as
opposed to short-term benefits from personal gains,” said Yi Luo, first
author of the research and a postdoctoral associate in the Montague lab.
“Our research shows investment in the early childhood education,
especially in the education of highly vulnerable children from
low-income families, can produce long-term effects in decision-making
even decades after the educational experience.”
An international
team collaborated to study the impact of early childhood interventions
on social decision-making. In addition to serving as the Virginia Tech
Carilion Vernon Mountcastle Research Professor at the VTCRI, a professor
in the Department of Physics at the Virginia Tech College of Science,
Montague is an honorary professor at University College London. Research
team members Tobias Nolte and Peter Fonagy are with the Wellcome Trust
Center for Neuroimaging at University College London. Co-author Peter
Dayan, who was with the University College London when the work was
done, was recently named director of the Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany. Andreas Hula is with the
Austrian Institute of Technology.
