A Novel Method to Improve Decision-Making in Young Adults and Adolescents

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): . Several studies report that males out-perform females on the most widely used experimental decision- making task, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). The male advantage is thought to be due to sex differences in regional activation of prefrontal cortex (RFC) during IGT performance. PET imagery shows that females activate left medial orbital prefrontal cortex (ORB) during IGT performance; while males activate right lateral ORB, right parietal lobe, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DL RFC, BA 9,10). Interestingly, in both genders, medial and lateral BA 9,10 regions are bilaterally activated during deliberation of Personal Moral (PM) dilemmas. We have recently shown that females' performance improves to the level of males when they intermittently deliberate PM dilemmas during performance of the IGT. The results suggested that there was a shift in the utilization of PFC circuitry while performing the two tasks. This was substantiated by changes among females in correlations between IGT performance and performance on olfactory ability tests. The data indicate that sex differences in decision-making are not hardwired but are modifiable by the cognitive/neural contexts in which they occur If this novel decision-enhancing effect is to have practical future applications, it must first be shown that the effect has residual power, i.e. that deliberation of moral dilemmas prior to choice behavior can improve the decision-making. The proposed studies are designed to determine (1) if deliberation of personal moral dilemmas prior to decision-making improves performance, i.e. is there a priming effect in normal young adults and, if so, what is its duration? (Preliminary data show that there is a priming effect) and (2) if either concurrent or prior deliberations of personal moral dilemmas improve IGT performance in adolescent participants. Published data from our lab show that that adolescents perform poorly on the IGT relative to adults. Those data provide a baseline against which to compare the results of the enhancement effect. Relevance of Research to Public Health: This study will produce information that will advance our knowledge of the flexibility of decision-making and how it may be improved by changing cognitive/neural contexts. The proposed study focuses on young adults and adolescents in the age range with the highest potential risk for lasting neurocognitive effects of making poor decisions relative to substances of abuse.