Neighborhood deprivation shapes motivational neurocircuit recruitment in children

Implementing motivated behaviors based on prior reward is central to adaptive human functioning, but aberrant reward-motivated behavior is a core feature of neuropsychiatric illness. Children from disadvantaged neighborhoods have decreased access to rewards, which may shape motivational neurocircuits and risk for psychopathology. Here, we leverage the unprecedented neuroimaging data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study to test the hypothesis that neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage shapes the functional recruitment of motivational neurocircuits in children. Specifically, via ABCD’s Monetary Incentive Delay task (N=6,396 9-10 year old children), we find that children from zip codes with a high Area Deprivation Index (ADI) demonstrate blunted recruitment of striatum (dorsal and ventral nuclei) and pallidum during reward anticipation. In fact, blunted dorsal striatal recruitment during reward anticipation mediated the association between ADI and increased attention problems. These data reveal a candidate mechanism driving elevated risk for psychopathology in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.