The MBB Lunch Series is free and open to the Harvard community.

Context-Sensitive Judgment Reflects Efficient Neural Coding
Rahul Bhui
Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychology

It is well known that the way we feel about an outcome depends on how we compare it to our past and present experiences. However, it is not so clear what kind of comparisons we make, or even why we make comparisons at all. In this talk, I draw on an influential branch of theoretical neuroscience to explain why this context dependence is adaptive. Our sense of value may adapt to our experiences for the same computational reason that our eyes adapt to light and dark: our neurons have a limited capacity to process information, which is best spent discerning the stimulus values we expect to encounter in our local environment. We show that influential psychological theories of context-sensitive judgment can be derived from the neurocomputational principle of efficient coding. This unites conflicting cognitive, behavioral, and neural findings spanning both perceptual and value-based judgment across multiple species into a single neurobiologically-grounded framework.

The Link Between One's Early-Life Family Environment and White Matter Microstructural Development
Scott Delaney
Graduate Student, Social Epidemiology

A child’s social environment can profoundly affect multiple domains of his or her development. While poor early-life social environments are linked with a range of health challenges, enriched social environments may promote healthy development beyond the mere absence of such challenges. Among many elements of a child’s social environment, the family environment is among the most impactful. Early-life family conflict is particularly toxic to healthy development and is associated with poor behavioral, academic, and physical health outcomes later in life. Despite this impact, research investigating biological and neurodevelopmental pathways linking one’s childhood family environment to his or her health and behavior remains limited.

In this study, we explore whether and to what extent early childhood family functioning is linked with global white matter microstructure in late childhood using a population-based neuroimaging dataset. In a sample of 2700 children in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, we find maternal-report prenatal family functioning is associated with increased global fractional anisotropy and decreased global mean diffusivity in a mean of measures from 14 major white matter tracts. Secondary analyses find supporting evidence for these relationships in nearly all individual tracts assessed. Together, these results suggest one’s early-life family environment is embodied broadly in white matter development, providing further evidence that public health policymakers and practitioners should emphasize positive perinatal family relationships to promote child wellbeing.