This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing theresources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject andinvestigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source,and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed isfor the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator.This collaborative NIH funded project involves parallel studies conducted in the Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin (Seth Pollak, Ph.D.) and the Center for Neurobehavioral Development, University of Minnesota (Megan Gunnar, Ph.D., and Charles Nelson, Ph.D.). The work explores the neurobiological bases of problems in attention/executive functions, sensory integration and emotion/stress regulation that are often exhibited by children who have experienced neglect/privation early in life. Children reared in institutions (e.g. orphanages) and then adopted at between 1 and 5 years of age into families in Wisconsin and Minnesota will serve as subjects. They will be compared to children adopted early (<6-8 months) with one or more months of institutional experience, and birth-reared children in families of similar education and income as the adoptive families. Eleven experiments, grouped into 7 studies, will be conducted with approximately half of the participants for each study tested at each site. These studies share common protocols across sites and the use of multi-site approach will allow us to increase both sample size and sample diversity among this specialized population of children. Both the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin possess large research registries of internationally adopted children. However, at neither site alone could the proposed studies be conducted in a manner that would adequately reflect the diversity of pre-adoption experiences and racial/ethnic backgrounds characteristic of international adoption. Studies of institutionally-reared children yield consistent evidence that early deprivation can have long-term consequences for cognitive and social functioning. Notably, extant research has employed gross measures of functioning. While such global measures provide some suggestion of which neural systems may have been affected, they are not specific enough to test hypotheses about the development of neural systems. Our goal is to more directly examine brain-behavior processes in children from institutionally deprived environments. We argue that this research will (a) inform our understanding of the brain-behavior impact of early deprivation/neglect, (b) enhance our ability to assess the bases of deprived children's cognitive and social-emotional difficulties, and (c) inform research on prevention/intervention for children who experienced early neglect/deprivation.
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