COMSTAR
Financiado
The effects of early life adversity on cognition A comparative approach.
This research programme will investigate how adversity experienced early in life affects cognition in adulthood in two different long-lived species, humans and European starlings. Previous research has suggested that there might b...
This research programme will investigate how adversity experienced early in life affects cognition in adulthood in two different long-lived species, humans and European starlings. Previous research has suggested that there might be cross-species similarities in the way early-life adversity shapes cognition, but the extent of commonalities has not been systematically investigated. I will focus on three cognitive domains where we have some evidence that early-life adversity may be important: impulsivity, dietary cognition, and threat-related cognition. For each domain, I will characterise how the trait relates to different facets of early-life adversity. These will be measured using socioeconomic and familial variables in humans, but in young starlings they will be experimentally manipulated via cross-fostering and hand-rearing siblings apart so that they experience different early histories. To measure the adult outcomes in each cognitive domain, I will develop novel behavioural paradigms with directly analogous versions in the two species. I will also examine whether telomere length, a cellular measure of cumulative stress exposure, statistically mediates the relationships between early-life adversity and the cognitive outcomes, thus testing recent theoretical models based on psychological adaptation to ones own physical state. In the second phase of the programme, I will focus on adaptive questions: do the observed effects of early-life adversity simply represent pathology, or can they be considered as adaptive responses? To test this, I will create ‘novel worlds’: experimental environments whose parameters I can vary systematically to establish whether there are circumstances under which individuals who have experienced early-life stress actually perform better than those from more benign developmental backgrounds. Thus, I will move beyond cataloguing the cognitive consequences of early-life adversity, and begin to explain them.
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Duración del proyecto: 71 meses
Fecha Inicio: 2015-07-15
Fecha Fin: 2021-06-30
Fecha Fin: 2021-06-30
Línea de financiación: concedida
El organismo H2020 notifico la concesión del proyecto el día 2021-06-30
Línea de financiación objetivo
El proyecto se financió a través de la siguiente ayuda:
ERC-ADG-2014:
ERC Advanced Grant
Cerrada
hace 10 años
Presupuesto
El presupuesto total del proyecto asciende a
2M€
Líder del proyecto
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
No se ha especificado una descripción o un objeto social para esta compañía.
Perfil tecnológico
TRL
4-5
Perfil tecnológico
TRL
4-5
2.15M€ |
Participante