The effect of experiences in infancy on human development is a central question in developmental science. Children raised in orphanage-like institutions for their first year or so of life and then adopted into well-resourced and supportive families provide a lens on the long-term effects of early deprivation and the capacity of children to recover from this type of early adversity. While it is challenging to identify cause-and-effect relations in the study of previously institutionalized individuals, finding results that are consistent with animal experimental studies and the one randomized study of removal from institutional care support the conclusion that many of the outcomes for these children were induced by early institutional deprivation. This review examines the behavioral and neural evidence for altered executive function, declarative memory, affective disorders, reward processing, reactivity to threat, risk-taking and sensation-seeking. We then provide a brief overview of the neurobiological mechanisms that may transduce early institutional experiences into effects on brain and behavior. In addition, we discuss implications for policy and practice.

婴儿期经历对人类发展的影响是发展科学的核心问题。孩子们在类似孤儿院的机构中度过了生命的第一年左右，然后被收养到资源充足和支持性的家庭中，这让我们能够了解早期剥夺的长期影响以及儿童从这种早期逆境中恢复的能力。 。虽然在对先前被收容的个体的研究中确定因果关系具有挑战性，但与动物实验研究一致的结果以及一项关于脱离机构护理的随机研究支持这样的结论：这些儿童的许多结果是由早期的制度剥夺引起的。这篇综述检查了执行功能、陈述性记忆、情感障碍、奖励处理、对威胁的反应、冒险和感觉寻求改变的行为和神经证据。然后，我们简要概述了可能将早期制度经验转化为对大脑和行为的影响的神经生物学机制。此外，我们还讨论了对政策和实践的影响。