Person:

Insel, Catherine

When pursuing high-value goals, mature individuals typically titrate cognitive performance according to environmental demands. However, it remains unclear whether adolescents similarly integrate value-based goals to selectively enhance goal-directed behavior. We used a value-contingent cognitive control task during fMRI to assess how stakes—the value of a prospective outcome—modulate flexible goal-directed behavior and underlying neurocognitive processes. Here we demonstrate that while adults enhance performance during high stakes, adolescents perform similarly during low and high stakes conditions. The developmental emergence of value-contingent performance is mediated by connectivity between the striatum and prefrontal cortex; this connectivity selectively increases during high stakes and with age. These findings suggest that adolescents may not benefit from high stakes to the same degree adults do—a behavioral profile that may be constrained by ongoing maturation of corticostriatal connectivity. We propose that late development of corticostriatal connectivity sets the stage for optimal goal-directed behavior.

Adolescence has been characterized as a developmental period of heightened reward seeking and attenuated aversive processing. However, it remains unclear how the neural bases of distinct outcome valuation processes shift during this stage of the lifespan. N = 74 participants ranging in age from 13 to 20 completed a value-modulated fMRI task in which participants earn low and high magnitude monetary outcomes to test whether gain and loss magnitude tracking- the neural representation of relative value in context- change differentially over this age span. Results revealed that gain and loss magnitude tracking follow asymmetric developmental trajectories. Gain magnitude tracking is elevated in in the striatum during early adolescence and then decreases with age. By contrast, loss magnitude tracking in the anterior insula follows a quadratic pattern, undergoing a temporary attenuation during mid-late adolescence. A typical comparison of gain versus loss outcomes (collapsing over magnitude effects) showed robust activity across a suite of brain regions sensitive to value based on prior work including the ventral striatum, but they exhibited no changes with age. These findings suggest that value coding subprocesses follow divergent developmental paths across adolescence, which may contribute to normative shifts in adolescent motivated behavior.