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Clinical lunch -- Town Hall
Clinical lunch -- Town Hall 12:00-1:00pm, Zoom, Millmont Cottage Conference Room
12:00-1:00pm, Zoom, Millmont Cottage Conference Room
 
 
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12:30pm, Zoom and 138 Millmont
 
Social lunch -- Dr. Willem Frankenhuis (U
Social lunch -- Dr. Willem Frankenhuis (U 12:30pm, Zoom, CDW 2539

Children living in harsh conditions tend to perform poorly on cognitive tests. However, there is growing interest in the hidden talents approach, which proposes that some abilities may be enhanced by adversity, especially those that are ecologically relevant to lived experience. The approach suggests the performance of adversity-exposed youth might improve under more ecologically relevant conditions. Here, we evaluate the role of ecologically relevant content in cognitive testing. To do so, we sampled 618 adolescents from a socioeconomically diverse population in the United States. Using interviews, self-reports, and school records we measured exposure to environmental unpredictability, violence, and poverty. We then tested performance on two widely used tasks: attention shifting and working memory updating. Two versions of each task were administered. The first used standard abstract stimuli and the second replaced standard stimuli with more ecologically relevant stimuli. We then tested the interactive effect of adversity and abstract vs ecological stimuli using a multiverse analysis approach. Overall, we found lowered performance among violence- and poverty-exposed youth on the abstract working memory updating task. However, under specific analytic decisions, ecological content produced an equalization effect: the updating performance gap between low and high-adversity exposed youth narrowed on the ecological updating task. We found no relation between updating performance and unpredictability and no interaction effects for attention shifting. This pattern of results is striking compared with the backdrop of developmental science, which almost exclusively reports lowered cognitive performance in people from harsh conditions.

12:30pm, Zoom, CDW 2539