Across species, caregivers exert a powerful influence on the neural and behavioral development of offspring. Increasingly, both animal and human research has highlighted specific patterns in caregivers’ behavior that may be especially important early in life, as well as neurobiological mechanisms linking early caregiving experiences with long-term affective behavior. Here we delineate evidence for an early sensitive period during infancy and toddlerhood when caregiver inputs that are predictable and associated with safety may become biologically embedded via influences on corticolimbic circuitry involved in emotion regulation. We propose that these caregiver signals prime corticolimbic circuitry to be receptive to later stage-specific caregiver influences, such as caregivers’ external regulation of children’s emotional reactivity. Following adversity that disrupts the predictability and safety associated with caregivers during this sensitive period, accelerated maturation of children’s corticolimbic circuitry may foreshorten the protracted period of plasticity and caregiver influence that is characteristic of humans. This work has implications for both prevention and intervention efforts targeting children exposed to adversity early in life.

跨物种，看护者对后代的神经和行为发育产生强大的影响。越来越多的动物和人类研究强调了看护者行为的特定模式，这在生命早期可能特别重要，以及将早期看护经历与长期情感行为联系起来的神经生物学机制。在这里，我们描述了婴儿期和学步期早期敏感期的证据，当时可预测且与安全相关的看护者输入可能通过对参与情绪调节的皮质边缘电路的影响而成为生物学嵌入。我们建议这些照顾者发出信号皮质边缘电路主要接受后期特定照顾者的影响，例如照顾者对儿童情绪反应的外部调节。在这个敏感时期破坏了与照顾者相关的可预测性和安全性的逆境之后，儿童皮质边缘电路的加速成熟可能会缩短人类特征的可塑性和照顾者影响的延长期。这项工作对针对生命早期遭受逆境的儿童的预防和干预工作都有影响。