The Roles of Delayed Cortical Maturation and Lower Anticipatory Reward Activation in Predicting Addictive Screen Use...

Addictive screen use (ASU), above and beyond screen time, has been linked to significant mental health risks. Yet little is known about the neural risk factors that may associate with ASU. We examined 2 neurodevelopmental factors-cognitive control and reward-highlighted in substance use research and their links to ASU.

We utilized resting-state and monetary incentive delay (MID) task functional magnetic resonance imaging data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study at baseline (Y0; ages 9-10 years) to predict addictive videogaming, addictive social media use, addictive phone use, and a composite measure of ASU at year 2 follow-up (Y2; ages 11-12 years). Cortical connectomic maturation was operationalized as distance from early life and proximity to adult functional networks in an individual connectome to potentially index cognitive control development. This was also supplemented by assessing cognitive task performance. Nucleus accumbens (NAc) activation in anticipation of reward in the MID task was used to assess reward processing.

Above and beyond total screen time and attention problems, lower connectomic maturation at Y0 associated with Y2 higher ASU composite and addictive videogaming. Analyses including task performance indicated that cortical maturation was associated with both ASU and task performance, but we did not find cognitive task performance to be directly related to ASU. Additionally, lower NAc anticipatory reward activation at Y0 was very weakly associated with higher Y2 ASU.

Delayed cortical network maturation and, to a lesser extent, lower anticipatory reward activation in 9-to-10-year-old children may be associated with ASU in early adolescence, above and beyond parent-reported attention problems.