Neurodevelopmental shifts in learned value transfer on cognitive control during adolescence

Abstract

Value-associated cues in the environment often enhance subsequent goal-directed behaviors in adults, a phenomenon supported by integration of motivational and cognitive neural systems.Given the interactions among these systems change throughout adolescence, we tested when beneficial effects of value associations on subsequent cognitive control performance emerge during adolescence. Participants (N=81) aged 13-20 completed a reinforcement learning task with four cue-incentive pairings that could yield high gain, low gain, high loss, or low loss outcomes. Next, participants completed a Go/NoGo task during fMRI where the NoGo targets comprised the previously learned cues, which tested how prior value associations influence cognitive control performance. Improved accuracy for previously learned high gain relative to low gain cues emerged with age. Older adolescents exhibited enhanced recruitment of the dorsal striatum and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during cognitive control execution to previously learned high gain relative to low gain cues. Older adolescents also expressed increased coupling between the dorsal striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for high gain cues, whereas younger adolescents expressed increased coupling between the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings reveal that learned high value cue-incentive associations enhance cognitive control in late adolescence in parallel with value-selective recruitment of corticostriatal systems.

Reward enhances memory via age-varying online and offline neural mechanisms across development

“…Eighty-nine participants ages 8- to 25-years-old (M age = 16.16, SD age = 4.67, 45 female) were included in analyses. A target sample size of n = 90, including 30 children, 30 adolescents, and 30 adults, was determined based on prior work using similar or smaller sample sizes to identify age-related differences in behavior and brain activation (Van Den Bos and Rodriguez, 2015; Insel et al, 2019; Callaghan et al, 2021). Data exclusions consisted of: eight participants with excessive motion (participants without at least one complete encoding, baseline arrows, and post-encoding arrows runs due to exclusions of runs with 15% or more timepoints censored with greater than 0.9 mm relative translational motion), seven participants who elected to not complete or terminate the fMRI scan, and five participants with incomplete datasets as a result of fMRI scanner malfunction.…”

Reward Enhances Memory via Age-Varying Online and Offline Neural Mechanisms across Development

“…Eighty-nine participants ages 8-to 25-years-old (Mage = 16.16, SDage = 4.67, 45 female) were included in analyses. A target sample size of n = 90, including 30 children, 30 adolescents, and 30 adults, was determined based on prior work using similar or smaller sample sizes to identify age-related differences in behavior and brain activation (Van Den Bos and Rodriguez, 2015;Insel et al, 2019;Callaghan et al, 2021). Data exclusions consisted of: eight participants with excessive motion (participants without at least one complete encoding, baseline arrows, and postencoding arrows runs due to exclusions of runs with 15% or more timepoints censored with greater than 0.9 mm relative translational motion), seven participants who elected to not complete or terminate the fMRI scan, and five participants with incomplete datasets as a result of fMRI scanner malfunction.…”