BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

Children reared under conditions of profound deprivation are not rare. By one estimate, there may be as many as 8,000,000 children around the world living in institutions. Because of the prevalence of international adoption (in 2008, there were more than 17,000 children adopted from other countries by families in the U.S., see United States Department of State, 2009), a number of projects have been launched examining the long-term develop-mental consequences of institutionalization. In this paper we focus exclusively on cognitive outcomes. Previous research has identifi ed a pattern of general intellectual impairment among children exposed to early institutional deprivation (Nelson et al., 2007; Smyke et al., 2007). Follow-up studies suggest that there are persistent effects of this deprivation on cognitive development into at least early adolescence (Beckett et al., 2006). However, our understanding of many fundamental questions about the developmental defi cits and trajectories of these children remains limited. The contributions of specifi c underlying processes (such as memory, attention, percep-tion, and problem solving) that may infl uence cognitive perform-ance in this group are not clearly understood and warrant further investigation. In one recent study, Colvert et al. (2008) of the English and Romanian Adoptees Study (ERAS) investigated possible defi cits in two neuropsychological processes, theory of mind and executive functioning, among 11-year-old children adopted from Romanian institutions into the UK. To evaluate executive functioning, thi