COGNITIVE AND NEURAL PROCESSES OF DECISION-MAKING IN ADOLESCENCE

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Studies of substance use, abuse and dependence suggests that it increases almost linearly throughout adolescence with earlier onset predicting greater severity and morbidity. These striking findings suggest adolescence is a period of increased risk for substance abuse, yet little is known to date, about the underlying factors that may predispose adolescents to suboptimal choices leading to this outcome. This study proposes to examine the development of cognitive and neural processes including effects of emotion and reward underlying decision-making that may place adolescents at greater risk for substance abuse. The extent to which manipulations of reward-based incentives, emotional content and impulsivity/risk-taking may bias decision-making will also be examined. Formal models of reinforcement learning and principles of decision-making together with functional neuroimaging will be used to constrain our hypotheses and interpretations about developmental and individual behavioral differences in decision-making. These studies will lay the critical groundwork for subsequent developmental studies on substance abuse, by mapping the typical developmental trajectory of cognitive and neural processes underlying decision-making.