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Abstract

The goal of this study was to examine age effects on the ability/willingness to wait for large rewards in a real temporal reward discounting task from childhood to adulthood. Therefore, a real temporal discounting (TD) task was administered to children aged 6–12 (n = 39), adolescents aged 13–17 (n = 28), and young adults aged 18–19 (n = 55). Findings indicated that the cross-sectional development of TD followed a quadratic pattern across age groups, with adolescents choosing more often than children and adults to wait for the large delayed reward, resulting in reward-maximization. Various interpretations of this finding were offered, including a focus on reward maximization despite an immature ability to exert self-control, and flexible self-control which was high during this task as a result of strong motivation to maximize financial gains.

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The adolescent brain.

Todd A. Hare, B. J. Casey, Rebecca Jones (2008)

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that are associated with an increased incidence of unintentional injuries, violence, substance abuse, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for adolescent behavior have failed to account for the nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to both childhood and adulthood. This review provides a biologically plausible model of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behavior. We provide evidence from recent human brain imaging and animal studies that there is a heightened responsiveness to incentives and socioemotional contexts during this time, when impulse control is still relatively immature. These findings suggest differential development of bottom-up limbic systems, implicated in incentive and emotional processing, to top-down control systems during adolescence as compared to childhood and adulthood. This developmental pattern may be exacerbated in those adolescents prone to emotional reactivity, increasing the likelihood of poor outcomes.

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The adolescent brain.

B. J. Casey, Sarah Getz, Adriana Galvan (2008)

Adolescence is a developmental period characterized by suboptimal decisions and actions that give rise to an increased incidence of unintentional injuries and violence, alcohol and drug abuse, unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Traditional neurobiological and cognitive explanations for adolescent behavior have failed to account for the nonlinear changes in behavior observed during adolescence, relative to childhood and adulthood. This review provides a biologically plausible conceptualization of the neural mechanisms underlying these nonlinear changes in behavior, as a heightened responsiveness to incentives while impulse control is still relatively immature during this period. Recent human imaging and animal studies provide a biological basis for this view, suggesting differential development of limbic reward systems relative to top-down control systems during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. This developmental pattern may be exacerbated in those adolescents with a predisposition toward risk-taking, increasing the risk for poor outcomes.

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Age-related change in executive function: developmental trends and a latent variable analysis.

Mariette Huizinga, Conor Dolan, Maurits W. Van der Molen (2006)

This study examined the developmental trajectories of three frequently postulated executive function (EF) components, Working Memory, Shifting, and Inhibition of responses, and their relation to performance on standard, but complex, neuropsychological EF tasks, the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST), and the Tower of London (ToL). Participants in four age groups (7-, 11-, 15-, and 21-year olds) carried out nine basic experimental tasks (three tasks for each EF), the WCST, and the ToL. Analyses were done in two steps: (1) analyses of (co)variance to examine developmental trends in individual EF tasks while correcting for basic processing speed, (2) confirmatory factor analysis to extract latent variables from the nine basic EF tasks, and to explain variance in the performance on WCST and ToL, using these latent variables. Analyses of (co)variance revealed a continuation of EF development into adolescence. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded two common factors: Working Memory and Shifting. However, the variables assumed to tap Inhibition proved unrelated. At a latent level, again correcting for basic processing speed, the development of Shifting was seen to continue into adolescence, while Working Memory continued to develop into young-adulthood. Regression analyses revealed that Working Memory contributed most strongly to WCST performance in all age groups. These results suggest that EF component processes develop at different rates, and that it is important to recognize both the unity and diversity of EF component processes in studying the development of EF.