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Blair et al.ABSTRACT
The authors examine the effects of poverty-related adversity on child development, drawing
upon psychobiological principles of experiential canalization and the biological embedding of
experience. They integrate findings from research on stress physiology, neurocognitive
function, and self-regulation to consider adaptive processes in response to adversity as an
aspect of children’s development. Recent research on early caregiving is paired with
research in prevention science to provide a reorientation of thinking about the ways in which
psychosocial and economic adversity are related to continuity in human development.
The progressive selection and shaping of abilities has also been proposed as a chief
characteristic of life span development. In life span theory, development in later adulthood
has been described as a process of selective optimization with compensation, in which ability
within a given domain is maintained by a narrowing of the focus and scope of activities within
that domain in order to compensate for a gradual decline in ability.
The idea that development is shaped by biology and experience coactively to promote
specific abilities over others is known as experiential canalization. Experiential canalization
describes a general developmental process through which biology and typically occurring
experience combine, often in ways that go largely unnoticed, to influence behavior. A central
idea in the canalization model is that experience induces functional activity from the
behavioral level to the cellular level to shape development to maximize functioning within a
specific expected environment. As such, the environment in combination with genetic
background directs the process of development; this combination functions as the source of
information in a developmental system. In other words, directions for development are not
simply encoded in DNA or present in the environment in a predetermined sense; rather,
genetic information and environmental information coactively and probabilistically determine
behavioral and psychological development.
Experiential canalization, or the selective optimization of behavior in response to experience,
is a central aspect of what is known as the developmental psychobiological model. This
model offers a framework for understanding the implications of developmental trade-offs, of
opportunities taken or foreclosed, that are inherent in distinct developmental pathways. Such
a perspective on development provides for greater complexity and specificity as well as for
greater probability of change or reversibility than is implied by an additive or simple
interactive model of biological and environmental inputs leading to child outcomes.
Poverty, parenting, and the psychobiology of self-regulation
It is well established that the material and psychosocial contexts of poverty adversely
affect multiple aspects of development in children. […] Children in conditions of
economic hardship face a wide array of dangers (e.g., higher probability of exposure
to environmental teratogens such as lead, higher levels of noise and crowding, and
lower levels of household and neighborhood safety) and simultaneously lower access
to supportive environments, such as high-quality child care.
An important feature of the experiential canalization model is that it indicates the
relevance of focusing not only on the absence of particular types of stimulation but
also on the presence of alternative types of stimulation that actively shape
development to meet a specific set of contingencies. […] The principle of experiential
canalization indicates the need to focus on the ways in which variables across levels
of analysis, from the genetic to the social, combine to shape development in favor of
one trajectory over another and to promote continuity for good and for ill.
Experiential canalization of development in low- versus high-resource environments
Characteristics of the environment influence parents’ psychological functioning and in
turn the quality of caregiving they provide. Quality of caregiving is then in turn
hypothesized to act as a key mediator of the linkage between children’s exposure to
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