The cognitive costs and advantages of children's exposure to parental relationship instability: Testing an evolutionary-developmental hypothesis.

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their preschool children ( M age 4.60 years; 56% girls) from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., 46% Black; 19% Latinx). Consistent with hypotheses, higher levels of parental relationship instability during preschool predicted children's poorer performance on explicit, higher-order cognitive functioning tasks (e.g., IQ, working memory) and better performance in detecting reward probabilities in an implicit learning task 2 years later. Results of the piecewise latent growth curve analysis of the implicit learning task revealed that children experiencing greater family instability were able to more rapidly identify the locations of the hidden rewards in the early, rather than later, stages of the games. Additional findings supported the role of children's antagonistic representations of family relationships as an intermediary mechanism. More specifically, parental relationship instability significantly predicted higher levels of children's antagonistic representations of their families 2 years later after controlling for their earlier antagonistic representations and demographic covariates. Children's antagonistic representations, in turn, were concurrently linked with poorer explicit cognitive functioning and better implicit learning abilities when they were in first grade. The findings inform an understanding of cognitive tradeoffs of experiencing parental relationship instability and may have important implications for modifying educational and clinical programs to capitalize on the cognitive strengths of children who experience environmental unpredictability. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).