Longitudinal effects of early psychosocial deprivation on macaque executive function: Evidence from computational modelling

Executive function (EF) describes a group of cognitive processes underlying the organization and control of goal-directed behaviour. Environmental experience appears to play a crucial role in EF development, with early psychosocial deprivation often linked to EF impairment. However, many questions remain concerning the developmental trajectories of EF after exposure to deprivation, especially concerning specific mechanisms. Accordingly, using an ‘A-not-B’ paradigm and a macaque model of early psychosocial deprivation, we investigated how early deprivation influences EF development longitudinally from adolescence into early adulthood. The contribution of working memory and inhibitory control mechanisms were examined specifically via the fitting of a computational model of decision making to the choice behaviour of each individual. As predicted, peer-reared animals (i.e. those exposed to early psychosocial deprivation) performed worse than mother-reared animals across time, with the fitted model parameters yielding novel insights into the functional decomposition of group-level EF differences underlying task performance. Results indicated differential trajectories of inhibitory control and working memory development in the two groups. Such findings not only extend our knowledge of how early deprivation influences EF longitudinally, but also provide support for the utility of computational modelling to elucidate specific mechanisms linking early psychosocial deprivation to long-term poor outcomes.