Neurodevelopmental shifts in learned value transfer on cognitive control during adolescence

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Developmental Psychology
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Value associations enhance goal-directed behaviors in adults via motivational and cognitive neural systems.
• Adolescence involves significant changes in the interaction between motivational and cognitive systems.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine when the beneficial effects of value associations on cognitive control emerge during adolescence.
• To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying these effects in different adolescent age groups.

Main Methods:

• Eighty-one participants aged 13-20 completed a reinforcement learning task with cue-incentive pairings.
• Participants then underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a Go/NoGo task using learned cues.

Main Results:

• Improved accuracy for high-gain cues relative to low-gain cues increased with age.
• Older adolescents showed greater recruitment of the dorsal striatum and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex for high-gain cues.
• Neural connectivity patterns differed between younger and older adolescents, particularly between striatal and prefrontal regions.

Conclusions:

• Learned high-value cue-incentive associations enhance cognitive control in late adolescence.
• This enhancement is associated with age-dependent, value-selective recruitment and coupling of corticostriatal systems.