Age-Related Patterns in Intuition about Risk and Reward

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Adolescence has long been recognized as a period of heightened risk taking. Yet, the reasons for this phenomenon remain unclear. The long-term objective of my research is to identify the developmental cognitive processes that contribute to increased risk taking in adolescence. Current theory posits that a rise and fall in reward sensitivity (i.e., how much a person's decision making is affected by potential rewards) across the transition from childhood to adulthood, due to pubertal maturation, produces the observed rise and fall in risk taking; adolescents are thought to weight potential rewards more heavily in risky decision making (i.e., decision making involving potential rewards and losses). However, empirical tests of this model often produce conflicting results, which, I argue, is because studies typically neglect the distinction between decision making based on intuition (“gut feeling”) versus deliberation (careful thought) and the impact of emotional arousal on decision making. Given that much of real-life risk taking occurs in circumstances that (a) favor intuitive over deliberative decision making and (b) excite emotional arousal, it is critical to test the effects of these factors on age related patterns in risky decision making and investigate the mechanisms that explain their effects. My lab will use experimental methods to assess whether adolescents' greater proclivity toward risk taking (relative to adjacent age groups) on laboratory risky decision tasks is amplified by reliance on intuition rather than deliberation and/or by emotional arousal. Using novel, mutimethod approaches we will also examine the age-related pattern in reward sensitivity, how it varies under different conditions (high vs. low arousal and reward salience), and its relation to risk taking. Our studies will include multiple physiological measures of arousal and reactivity to stimuli; we will test which physiological measures are most sensitive to variation in reward magnitude in order to use these data to uncover the mechanisms underlying age differences in risky decision making. For example, these data will enable us to test whether the commonly observed “peer effect”whereby the presence of peers induces adolescents but not adults to make riskier decisionscan be explained by peer presence eliciting greater arousal in adolescents. We will also be the first to compare the effects of different forms of arousal (e.g., due to monetary incentive, peer presence, or peer competition) on age-related patterns in risky decision making and reward sensitivity. Finally, we will use our rich data set to model relations between risk taking, reward sensitivity, and pubertal development across a wide age range (ages 1030).This program of research will help us understand when and why adolescents are more risk-prone than other age groups and will serve as a platform to train many graduate and undergraduate students.