Do adolescents always take more risks than adults? A within-subjects developmental study of context effects on decision making and processing.

Adolescents take more risks than adults in the real world, but laboratory experiments do not consistently demonstrate this pattern. In the current study, we examine the possibility that age differences in decision making vary as a function of the nature of the task (e.g.

The Role of Social Reward and Corticostriatal Connectivity in Substance Use.

This report describes an ongoing R03 grant that explores the links between trait reward sensitivity, substance use, and neural responses to social and nonsocial reward. Although previous research has shown that trait reward sensitivity and neural responses to reward are linked to substance use, whether this relationship is impacted by how people process social stimuli remains unclear. We are investigating these questions via a neuroimaging study with college-aged participants, using individual difference measures that examine the relation between substance use, social context, and trait reward sensitivity with tasks that measure reward anticipation, strategic behavior, social reward consumption, and the influence of social context on reward processing.

Wired to be connected? Links between mobile technology engagement, intertemporal preference and frontostriatal white matter connectivity.

Youth around the world are increasingly dependent on social media and mobile smartphones. This phenomenon has generated considerable speculation regarding the impacts of extensive technology engagement on cognitive development and how these habits might be 'rewiring' the brains of those growing up in a heavily digital era. In an initial study conducted with healthy young adults, we utilized behavioral and self-report measures to demonstrate associations between smartphone usage habits (assessed both subjectively and objectively) and individual differences in intertemporal preference and reward sensitivity.

The interactive effects of peers and alcohol on functional brain connectivity in young adults.

Alcohol and peer influence are known to have independent effects on risky decision making. We investigated combined influences of peers and alcohol on functional brain connectivity and behavior. Young adults underwent fMRI while completing response inhibition (Go/No-Go) and risky driving (Stoplight) tasks.

The Influences of Described and Experienced Information on Adolescent Risky Decision Making.

Adolescents are known to take more risks than adults, which can be harmful to their health and well-being. However, despite age differences in real-world risk taking, laboratory risk-taking paradigms often do not evince these developmental patterns. Recent findings in the literature suggest that this inconsistency may be due in part to differences between how adolescents process information about risk when it is described (e.

Peers influence adolescent reward processing, but not response inhibition.

Most adolescent risk taking occurs in the presence of peers. Prior research suggests that peers alter adolescents' decision making by increasing reward sensitivity and the engagement of regions involved in the processing of rewards, primarily the striatum. However, the potential influence of peers on the capacity for impulse control, and the associated recruitment of the brain's control circuitry, has not yet been adequately examined.

Working Memory Training in Adolescents Decreases Laboratory Risk Taking in the Presence of Peers.

Adolescence is a period of heightened risk-taking relative to both adulthood and childhood, due in part to peers' increased influence on adolescent decision making. Because adolescents' choices have harmful consequences, there is great interest in specific interventions that might attenuate risk taking. We hypothesized that it might be possible to reduce adolescent risk taking through an intervention targeting the ability/tendency to engage cognitive control processes.

Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of Research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning.

While smartphones and related mobile technologies are recognized as flexible and powerful tools that, when used prudently, can augment human cognition, there is also a growing perception that habitual involvement with these devices may have a negative and lasting impact on users' ability to think, remember, pay attention, and regulate emotion. The present review considers an intensifying, though still limited, area of research exploring the potential cognitive impacts of smartphone-related habits, and seeks to determine in which domains of functioning there is accruing evidence of a significant relationship between smartphone technology and cognitive performance, and in which domains the scientific literature is not yet mature enough to endorse any firm conclusions. We focus our review primarily on three facets of cognition that are clearly implicated in public discourse regarding the impacts of mobile technology - attention, memory, and delay of gratification - and then consider evidence regarding the broader relationships between smartphone habits and everyday cognitive functioning.

Adolescent risk-taking is predicted by individual differences in cognitive control over emotional, but not non-emotional, response conflict.

While much research on adolescent risk behaviour has focused on the development of prefrontal self-regulatory mechanisms, prior studies have elicited mixed evidence of a relationship between individual differences in the capacity for self-regulation and individual differences in risk taking. To explain these inconsistent findings, it has been suggested that the capacity for self-regulation may be, for most adolescents, adequately mature to produce adaptive behaviour in non-affective, "cold" circumstances, but that adolescents have a more difficult time exerting control in affective, "hot" contexts. To further explore this claim, the present study examined individual differences in self-control in the face of affective and non-affective response conflict, and examined whether differences in the functioning of cognitive control processes under these different conditions was related to risk taking.

Variation in strategy use across measures of verbal working memory.

The working memory (WM) literature contains a number of tasks that vary on dimensions such as when or how memory items are reported. In addition to the ways in which WM tasks are designed to differ, tasks may also diverge according to the strategies participants use during task performance. The present study included seven tasks from the WM literature, each requiring short-term retention of verbal items.

Mobile technology habits: patterns of association among device usage, intertemporal preference, impulse control, and reward sensitivity.

Mobile electronic devices are playing an increasingly pervasive role in our daily activities. Yet, there has been very little empirical research investigating how mobile technology habits might relate to individual differences in cognition and affect. The research presented in this paper provides evidence that heavier investment in mobile devices is correlated with a relatively weaker tendency to delay gratification (as measured by a delay discounting task) and a greater inclination toward impulsive behavior (i.

Effects of action video game training on visual working memory.

The ability to hold visual information in mind over a brief delay is critical for acquiring information and navigating a complex visual world. Despite the ubiquitous nature of visual working memory (VWM) in our everyday lives, this system is fundamentally limited in capacity. Therefore, the potential to improve VWM through training is a growing area of research.

Sex differences in the developmental trajectories of impulse control and sensation-seeking from early adolescence to early adulthood.

It has been proposed that high rates of risk-taking in adolescence are partly attributable to patterns of neurobiological development that promote an increase in sensation-seeking tendencies at a time when impulse control is still developing. It is not known, however, whether this pattern is the same for males and females. The present study investigates sex differences in the developmental trajectories of self-reported impulse control and sensation-seeking between the ages of 10 and 25 using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 Child and Young Adult Survey (N = 8,270; 49% female; 33% Black, 22% Hispanic, 45% Non-Black, Non-Hispanic).

Primacy and recency effects as indices of the focus of attention.

Ongoing debate surrounds the capacity and characteristics of the focus of attention. The present study investigates whether a pattern of larger recency effects and smaller primacy effects reported in previous working memory studies is specific to task conditions used in those studies, or generalizes across manipulations of task-demand. Two experiments varied task-demands by requiring participants to remember lists of letters and to then respond to a subsequent two-item probe by indicating either the item that was presented later in the list (judgment of recency) or the item was presented earlier (judgment of primacy).

Working memory and insight in verbal problems: analysis of compound remote associates.

Problem solving is sometimes accompanied by a sudden feeling of knowing, or insight. The specific cognitive processes that underlie insightful problem solving are a matter of great interest and debate. Although some investigators favor a special-process view, which explains insight in terms of specialized mechanisms that operate outside of conscious awareness, others favor a business-as-usual account, which posits that insightful problem solving involves the same conscious mechanisms-including working memory (WM) and attention-that are implicated in noninsightful problem solving.

Overlap of phonetic features as a determinant of the between-stream phonological similarity effect.

Serial recall from working memory is known to be impaired by the presence of irrelevant background speech, but several prior studies have concluded that the magnitude of the impairment is independent of the phonological relationship between to-be-remembered (TBR) and to-be-ignored (TBI) sources of information. In the present study, we examined the influence of between-stream phonological similarity in serial recall while attending to a heretofore uncontrolled variable, the phonetic feature. We found that TBI items sharing many phonetic features with TBR items produced significantly stronger working-memory impairments than TBI items with minimal phonetic feature overlap.

Working memory training and transfer in older adults.

There has been a great deal of interest, both privately and commercially, in using working memory training exercises to improve general cognitive function. However, many of the laboratory findings for older adults, a group in which this training is of utmost interest, are discouraging due to the lack of transfer to other tasks and skills. Importantly, improvements in everyday functioning remain largely unexamined in relation to WM training.

Does working memory training work? The promise and challenges of enhancing cognition by training working memory.

A growing body of literature shows that one's working memory (WM) capacity can be expanded through targeted training. Given the established relationship between WM and higher cognition, these successful training studies have led to speculation that WM training may yield broad cognitive benefits. This review considers the current state of the emerging WM training literature, and details both its successes and limitations.

Working memory and insight in the nine-dot problem.

In the present article, we examine the contribution of working memory (WM) to solution of the nine-dot problem, a classic insight problem. Prior research has generally demonstrated a limited role for WM in the solution of insight problems, which are typically assumed to be solved without conscious planning. However, MacGregor, Ormerod, and Chronicle (2001) proposed an information-processing model that solves the nine-dot problem by relying on a visual WM mechanism, which they term lookahead.

Domain-general mechanisms of complex working memory span.

A new fMRI complex working memory span paradigm was used to identify brain regions making domain-general contributions to working memory task performance. For both verbal and spatial versions of the task, complex working memory span performance increased the activity in lateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and parietal cortices during the Encoding, Maintenance, and Coordination phase of task performance. Meanwhile, overlapping activity in anterior prefrontal and medial temporal lobe regions was associated with both verbal and spatial recall from working memory.

Expanding the mind's workspace: training and transfer effects with a complex working memory span task.

In the present study, a novel working memory (WM) training paradigm was used to test the malleability of WM capacity and to determine the extent to which the benefits of this training could be transferred to other cognitive skills. Training involved verbal and spatial versions of a complex WM span task designed to emphasize simultaneous storage and processing requirements. Participants who completed 4 weeks of WM training demonstrated significant improvements on measures of temporary memory.

Evaluating models of working memory through the effects of concurrent irrelevant information.

Working memory is believed to play a central role in almost all domains of higher cognition, yet the specific mechanisms involved in working memory are still fiercely debated. We describe a neuroimaging experiment with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a companion behavioral experiment, and in both we seek to adjudicate between alternative theoretical models of working memory on the basis of the effects of interference from articulatory suppression, irrelevant speech, and irrelevant nonspeech. In Experiment 1 we examined fMRI signal changes induced by each type of irrelevant information while subjects performed a probed recall task.

Neuroimaging studies of practice-related change: fMRI and meta-analytic evidence of a domain-general control network for learning.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging and a meta-analysis of prior neuroimaging studies were used to characterize cortical changes resulting from extensive practice and to evaluate a dual-processing account of the neural mechanisms underlying human learning. Three core predictions of the dual processing theory are evaluated: 1) that practice elicits generalized reductions in regional activity by reducing the load on the cognitive control mechanisms that scaffold early learning; 2) that these control mechanisms are domain-general; and 3) that no separate processing pathway emerges as skill develops. To evaluate these predictions, a meta-analysis of prior neuroimaging studies and a within-subjects fMRI experiment contrasting unpracticed to practiced performance in a paired-associate task were conducted.