The development of neural responses to punishment in adolescence

描述（由申请人提供）：青春期是开始使用药物的风险期，在这几年中开始使用药物的人比生命中的任何其他时间都多。此外，那些在青春期较早开始吸毒的人在以后的生活中出现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，非法使用毒品， 不安全性行为研究旨在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，青少年对奖励的敏感性会发生变化，但很少有研究考察对惩罚的敏感性的发展。最近的研究表明，从惩罚中学习的能力在整个青春期都在不断发展。然而，目前尚不清楚这是因为儿童和青少年只是觉得负面事件不如成年人那么令人厌恶，还是因为他们觉得惩罚同样令人不快，但无法将这些信息纳入学习信号，称为预测错误信号，这是学习接近或避免先前分别受到奖励或惩罚的刺激所必需的。这项研究的目的是通过让一组儿童、青少年和年轻人在MRI扫描仪中执行一个价调制概率学习任务来分离这两种可能性，在这个任务中，他们在一个区块中做出正确的选择而受到奖励，在另一个区块中做出不正确的选择而受到惩罚。BOLD反应将在负反馈与正反馈的对比中进行测量，并在不同年龄组之间进行比较，以确定对惩罚的总体反应的发展差异，并将单独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相对于成年人会有所减少。

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.