Scars from harsh
early years linger
Brain changes seen among
kids from grim orphanage
followed a highly regimented schedule
of activities. The kids received very little
attention from caregivers.
Nelson and his team arranged for half
of these children to move into individual
homes for foster care. (A bias against foster care in Romania made the situation
unusual.) Called the Bucharest Early
Intervention Project, the experiment
offered a way to test the importance of
a good environment.
Echoes of a hard start in
life persisted long after the
orphans had moved into
a home, the team found.
At age 8, kids who spent
their first two years or
longer in an orphanage
before moving to foster
care had profound deficits
in how they interacted
with other children. The
kids couldn’t carry on a conversation
normally and had other social problems.
But kids who escaped the orphanages
before they turned 2 were able to recover
normal social skills, performing as well
as children who had been raised in their
own homes.
In addition to behavioral problems, the
children raised in an orphanage showed
brain differences, too. MRI brain scans
revealed that kids who were institution-
alized had dramatically lower volumes of
gray matter — which contains the brain’s
nerve cells — than children who grew up
normally in their own home. Whether
or not the child moved to a foster home
didn’t matter: Living in the orphan-
ages for any amount of time was tied to
reduced gray matter.
But the story was different for
another kind of brain tissue: The volume of white
matter — tissue that carries
nerve cell signals around
the brain — was lower than
normal for kids who were
in an orphanage for two or
more years. White matter
volume was greater in children who left the orphanage before age 2 but still
lower than that seen in
kids who had never been in an orphanage. The results suggest that white
matter, a brain tissue that is thought to be
heavily responsive to the environment,
may be able to bounce back from an early
rough start.
“Institutional care should be considered the last resort,” Nelson said. “And
effort should be made to place a child as
soon as possible.” s
“I think this
work nails the
really important
issues in trying
to understand
the effects
of early life
experiences.”
JANET WERKER
By Laura Sanders
Social media didn’t spur
Arab Spring
the Arab spring protests and upris-
ings that began in December 2010
have been characterized as twitter
and facebook revolutions, but new
research suggests that social media
platforms had a mixed effect on politi-
cal change. An analysis of 10 months
of news, information and social media
use in 18 Arab spring countries found
that the number of facebook users
did swell during that time. But the
pattern of increased use of social
media didn’t cleanly match up with
www.sciencenews.org
the pattern of protests. social media
sites told people where to find infor-
mation, not to revolt, Kathleen Carley
of Carnegie Mellon university in Pitts-
burgh reported february 18. Concerns
over human rights and international
relations issues such as troop move-
ments were more predictive of who
protested where, and when.
— Rachel Ehrenberg
Video games improve vision
Violent video games get a bad rap,
but they may benefit people with
vision problems, psychologist Daphne
Maurer of McMaster university in
Canada reported february 17. Playing
the game Medal of Honor, in which the
user sees scenes from the perspective
of a soldier, for 40 hours over a month
improved a host of visual abilities in
adults who were born with cataracts.
even though the participants had their
cataracts removed when they were
young, vision deficits persisted. But 40
hours of gaming that requires users to
survey a wide field and react quickly to
threats improved multiple visual skills.
Maurer and her colleagues are devel-
oping a less gory version of the game
that can do the same job without all
the bloodshed. — Laura Sanders
