New research published in Development and Psychopathology suggests that childhood neglect is associated with slower development of working memory abilities throughout adolescence and into young adulthood. While executive function abilities generally improve from ages 14 to 20, those who experienced neglect showed a more gradual increase in working memory compared to their peers. The study did not find a similar link between childhood abuse and working memory development.
The Virginia Tech research team, consisting of Claudia Clinchard, Brooks Casas, and Jungmeen Kim-Spoon, conducted the study to better understand how different types of childhood maltreatment might impact the development of executive function. Executive function refers to a set of higher-order cognitive skills that help individuals plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Adolescence is a period of significant development in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area critical for executive function.
Prior research has shown that adults who experienced childhood maltreatment often have deficits in executive function, but less was known about how abuse and neglect might uniquely affect its development during adolescence. Given that one in seven children in the United States experiences maltreatment, the researchers aimed to examine this link. They also sought to test a theory called the Dimensional Model of Adversity and Psychopathology, which proposes that different types of adversity have distinct effects on brain development and cognitive function.
“One main reason we were interested in this topic was we wanted to better understand the impacts that abuse and neglect have on the trajectories of executive function (cognitive skills needed to help with planning, solving problems, and adapting to novel situations in order to meet goals) development during adolescence and into young adulthood. Executive function has been studied frequently in children but less so in adolescence and into young adulthood, so one aim was to see how executive function developed during this time,” the researchers told PsyPost.
To investigate this, the researchers followed 167 adolescents over six years, from ages 14 to 20. At each time point, participants completed three behavioral tasks designed to measure different aspects of executive function: working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility. Working memory was assessed using a task where participants had to repeat a series of numbers backward. Inhibitory control, the ability to suppress impulses and resist distractions, was measured using a task in which participants identified a number that was different from two others, with the complexity of the task increasing over time.
Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between different tasks or rules, was measured using a card-sorting task where the rules for sorting changed throughout the task. At ages 18–19, participants completed a questionnaire called the Maltreatment and Abuse Chronology of Exposure scale, which asked them to recall instances of neglect and abuse they experienced from ages 1 to 13. Neglect was defined as experiencing emotional or physical neglect, while abuse included sexual, verbal, physical, and non-verbal abuse. The researchers then analyzed how these recalled experiences of neglect and abuse were related to changes in executive function over time.
The results showed that, on average, all three components of executive function—working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility—improved across adolescence and into young adulthood. However, when examining the effects of childhood maltreatment, some interesting patterns emerged. Specifically, experiencing neglect during childhood was associated with slower growth in working memory abilities over the six-year period. Adolescents who reported higher levels of neglect showed a more gradual increase in their working memory performance compared to those who reported less or no neglect.
“It was interesting that neglect had a more notable impact on working memory than inhibitory control or cognitive flexibility,” the researchers said. “We had anticipated all three aspects to be similarly affected by early neglect experience.”
Notably, childhood abuse was not significantly linked to changes in working memory development. Neither neglect nor abuse was found to be significantly related to changes in inhibitory control or cognitive flexibility during the study period.
“Experiences of neglect during childhood specifically have negative impacts on working memory development during adolescence and into young adulthood,” the researchers said.
The researchers acknowledge some limitations of the study. Although the study followed participants over several years, the correlational nature of the data means that they cannot definitively say that neglect causes slower growth in working memory.
“Our findings do not indicate that neglect causes these effects,” the researchers noted. “This study is longitudinal and spans across adolescence and into young adulthood and the data support our theoretical-informed models, but it is important to note that we cannot infer causation.”
The researchers suggest several directions for future research. They propose that future studies should examine how executive function continues to develop later into adulthood and older adulthood and whether the timing of abuse and neglect experiences during childhood has different effects on this development. Future research could also explore the role of genetics in influencing executive function development, as well as the potential impact of other forms of adversity, such as unpredictability in one’s environment.
“The long-term goals for this line of research include looking at different developmental periods, such as later into adulthood and older adulthood, and examining how the timing of abuse and neglect in childhood (for example, between birth and age 5 compared to between ages 6 and 13) might change the results,” the researchers explained.
The study, “Child maltreatment and executive function development throughout adolescence and into young adulthood,” was published October 28, 2024.