Early-life adversity and adult cognition: the starling as an experimental model.

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People who experience a harsh environment in early life - for example, low birthweight, family poverty or family disruption - are more likely to experience depression, addictions and behavioural problems years later when they are adults. This suggests that harsh early conditions induce a cognitive style involving increased pessimism and impulsivity. The human evidence for such effects is necessarily correlational. To show experimentally that there is a causal relationship, an animal model is required. In this project, we will develop a novel animal model for studying the effects of early-life conditions on adult cognition, using European starlings. Starlings have many advantages; they are long-lived, wild animals, for whom cognitive measures in the laboratory have already been developed. Most importantly, we can experimentally manipulate the harshness of the early environment in a natural setting, by either reducing the number of chicks in a nest to 2, or increasing to 7. We will create 32 enlarged and 32 reduced nests at farms in Northumberland, and take one chick from each into the laboratory, where we will use established cognitive tasks to examine pessimism and impulsivity. These tasks involve the animal having to interpret an ambiguous stimulus as either positive or negative (for pessimism), and having to choose between immediate and deferred rewards (for impulsivity). We will also examine the extent to which a positive current environment can compensate for harsh conditions in early-life, by housing half of our birds in barren and half in enriched conditions during the testing phase. In addition, we will use a number of biological measures to explore the mechanisms underlying the impact of early-life conditions on adult phenotype. These are growth profile, responsivity of the stress hormone corticosterone, oxidative stress and telomere length. Each of these has been implicated in how early events impact on adults, in humans as well as other animals. This study will constitute the first experimental evidence for an impact of early-life events on adult pessimism and impulsivity, and will begin to elucidate the mechanisms involved. The results have important implications for understanding the causes of the excess burden of depression, addictions and conduct disorder in deprived communities, and will help understand the extent to which a positive adult environment can mitigate the effects of early-life environment.