From Belief to Brain: How Growth Mindset Optimizes Cortico-Striatal Dynamics for Cognitive Development

Abstract Growth mindset—the belief that abilities are malleable through effort—drives motivation, action and achievement. Yet, the underlying mechanisms remain elusive, necessitating a unified framework that integrates cognitive, neural, and developmental processes. Leveraging longitudinal neuroimaging and computational modeling to reveal moment-to-moment decision responses and brain state dynamics during working memory (WM), we show that growth mindset enhances WM development from middle childhood to adolescence via nuanced cortico-striatal network dynamics that balance between brain state flexibility and stability. Behaviorally, children with higher growth mindset exhibited better WM performance both cross-sectionally and longitudinally, attributed to faster evidence accumulation during moment-to-moment information updating, especially under high task demands. Neurally, a higher growth mindset was associated with greater activation of the dorsal striatum, cingulo-opercular (action-mode), and fronto-parietal networks during WM, which further accounted for longitudinal WM improvement and latent evidence accumulation. Such cortico-striatal activation covaried with neurochemical mediators critical for motivation and executive functioning. Analyzing non-stationary network dynamics revealed that growth mindset optimized dynamical organization of cortico-striatal networks, with an activated state highly flexible to support moment-to-moment information updating and a deactivated state remaining stable across blocks to suppress irrelevant information. This suggests a balanced allocation of resources for accumulating evidence while suppressing noise during WM. Together, our findings support a neurocognitive framework in which growth mindset enhances WM development via nuanced orchestration of cortico-striatal networks to enable efficient dynamic computations and foster far-reaching cognitive development.