The development of neural responses to punishment in adolescence

描述(由申请人提供)：青春期是开始吸毒的风险期，在这几年里，开始吸毒的人比一生中任何时候都多。此外，那些在青春期较早开始吸毒的人在以后的生活中形成药物滥用和依赖的风险更大。众所周知，青少年不成比例地从事许多类型的危险行为，如鲁莽驾驶、非法吸毒和 不安全的性行为。研究的目的是确定神经处理的发展是否会导致青春期后冒险行为的下降。虽然有几项研究表明，奖赏敏感度在青春期发生了变化，但很少有研究研究惩罚敏感度的发展。最近的研究从行为上证明，从惩罚中学习的能力在整个青春期都会继续发展。然而，目前尚不清楚这是因为儿童和青少年只是发现负面事件没有成年人那么令人厌恶，还是他们发现惩罚同样令人不快，但无法将这些信息纳入学习信号，即所谓的预测误差信号，这是学习接近或避免之前分别受到奖励或惩罚的刺激所必需的。这项拟议的研究旨在通过让一组儿童、青少年和年轻人在核磁共振扫描仪中执行价调概率学习任务来分离这两种可能性，在其中一种情况下，他们因做出正确选择而受到奖励，而在另一种情况下，他们因做出不正确选择而受到惩罚。大胆反应将在负反馈和正反馈的对比中进行测量，并在不同年龄段之间进行比较，以确定对惩罚的总体反应的发展差异，并分别测量对惩罚的预测错误反应。我们预测，在负反馈与正反馈的对比中，不会出现年龄差异，但儿童和青少年的预测错误反应将比成人有所减弱。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Adolescence is a risk period for the onset of drug use, with more individuals initiating drug use during these years than any other time in life. In addition, those individuals who initiate drug use earlier in adolescence are at greater risk for developing drug abuse and dependence later in life. Adolescents are known to engage disproportionately in many types of risky behavior, such as reckless driving, illicit drug use, and unsafe sex. Research has aimed to determine whether the development of neural processing could lead to the post- adolescent drop in risk-taking behavior. While several studies have demonstrated shifts in reward sensitivity across adolescence, very little research has examined the development of sensitivity to punishment. Recent research has demonstrated behaviorally that the ability to learn from punishment continues to develop throughout adolescence. It is unclear, however, if this is because children and adolescents simply find negative events less aversive than adults, or if, instead, they find punishment equally unpleasant, but are unable to incorporate this information into a learning signal, known as a prediction error signal, that is necessary to learn to approach or avoid stimuli that have previously been rewarded or punished, respectively. The proposed study aims to dissociate between these two possibilities by having groups of children, adolescents, and young adults perform a valence-modulated probabilistic learning task in an MRI scanner, where they be rewarded for correct choices during one block, and punished for incorrect choices during another. BOLD response will be measured in a contrast of negative feedback vs. positive feedback and compared across age groups to determine developmental differences in overall response to punishment, and separately prediction error response to punishment will be measured. We predict that no age differences will emerge in the negative feedback vs. positive feedback contrast, but children and adolescents will show a diminished prediction error response relative to adults.