An extensive body of research has documented cognitive impairments in children who develop in high-adversity contexts. These findings have led to the predominant view that chronic stress impairs cognition. However, this is not the whole story. Recent theory suggests that these same individuals may also develop enhanced cognitive abilities for solving problems in high-adversity contexts. This specialization hypothesis predicts that people from harsh environments will show improved performance on tasks matching recurrent problems in those environments. This novel hypothesis has not yet been assessed within the context of learning, where it may have important implications for education, employment, and interventions. Here, we examine the ability to learn about danger versus non-danger information in college students. We describe the results of an unpublished, preregistered, well-powered, and confirmatory study (N=126) showing that college students with more involvement in, but not more exposure to, violence learn better about danger but not about location information, than peers with less involvement in violence.

This study will be submitted as a Registered Report to a journal. Although the date of release is not yet known, its publication is expected to take around 18 months to be available