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Adolescent Development of Value-Guided Goal Pursuit
Juliet Y Davidow1, Catherine Insel1, Leah H Somerville2
1Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge MA USA; These authors contributed equally to this work.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
|June 9, 2018
Summary
As children mature, their ability to use value signals to guide goal-directed actions improves, enabling them to tackle more complex cognitive tasks and challenges.
Area of Science:
- Developmental psychology
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive science
Background:
- Adolescents increasingly manage independent, consequential decisions.
- Value signals are crucial for selecting goals and allocating effort.
- Understanding age-related changes in value-guided behavior is essential.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine age-related changes in using value signals for goal-directed behavior.
- To investigate how value and task difficulty influence action execution during development.
- To propose a framework for the expansion of value-guided goal pursuit with age.
Main Methods:
- Review of emerging literature on value-guided cognitive control.
- Integration of concepts from reinforcement learning.
- Analysis of developmental trajectories from childhood to adulthood.
Main Results:
- Value and task difficulty interact to modulate goal-directed action execution across development.
- The capacity for value-guided goal pursuit expands with age.
- Functional integration within valuation, cognition, and action brain networks supports this development.
Conclusions:
- Value-guided goal pursuit becomes more sophisticated with age.
- Development involves enhanced integration of neural networks for valuation, cognition, and action.
- This developmental process enables adolescents to navigate increasingly complex, goal-directed behaviors.
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