Understanding the Dynamics of the Developing Adolescent Brain Through Team Science.

One of the major goals for research on adolescent development is to identify the optimal conditions for adolescents to grow up in a complex social world and to understand individual differences in these trajectories. Based on influential theoretical and empirical work in this field, achieving this goal requires a detailed understanding of the social context in which neural and behavioral development takes place, along with longitudinal measurements at multiple levels (e.g.

Growing in generosity? The effects of giving magnitude, target, and audience on the neural signature of giving in adolescence.

Giving is essential for forming and maintaining social relationships, which is an important developmental task for adolescents. This pre-registered fMRI study investigated behavioral and neural correlates of adolescents' (N = 128, ages 9 - 19 years) small versus large size giving in different social contexts related to target (i.e.

Ranking status differentially affects rejection sensitivity in adolescence: An event-related potential study.

Adolescents are sensitive to peer rejection but this may be dependent on their status. This study examined the role of ranking status on rejection sensitivity in adolescence using an experimental bargaining design. To manipulate ranking status, participants between ages 9-22-years (final sample n = 102) performed a reaction time task with two peers to induce high and low status.

Mood Variability Among Early Adolescents in Times of Social Constraints: A Daily Diary Study During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated governmental regulations have drastically changed the daily social lives of children, adolescents, and adults. Changes in the social context may particularly affect children who are in the transition to adolescents (henceforth referred to as early adolescents) as adolescence is a crucial period for peer interactions and development of independence and autonomy. Yet, the impact of the pandemic and associated governmental regulations on early adolescents' emotional well-being has yet to be clarified.

A daily diary study on adolescents' mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adolescence is a formative phase for social development. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated regulations have led to many changes in adolescents' lives, including limited opportunities for social interactions. The current exploratory study investigated the effect of the first weeks of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown on Dutch adolescents' (N = 53 with attrition, N = 36 without attrition) mood, empathy, and prosocial behavior.

Familiarity and Audience Effects on Giving: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.

Giving is often characterized by the conflicting decision to give up something of value to benefit others. Recent evidence indicated that giving is highly context-dependent. To unravel the neural correlates of social context, in this study, young adults ( = 32) performed a novel giving fMRI paradigm, in which they divided coins between self and known (friends) or unknown (unfamiliar) others.

Giving to Friends, Classmates, and Strangers in Adolescence.

This study examined how perspective taking and sensitivity to social rewards predict giving to friends, classmates, and strangers in adolescence. Five hundred and twenty adolescents aged 12-17 years completed questionnaires on perspective taking and social rewards and played three Dictator Games in which they divided coins between themselves and a friend, classmate, and stranger. We found that, irrespective of age, adolescents donated most to a friend, less to their classmate, and least to a stranger, and females donated more than males.

Developmental Changes and Individual Differences in Trust and Reciprocity in Adolescence.

A Trust Game was used to examine trust and reciprocity development in 12-18-year-old-adolescents (N = 496), as findings have been conflicting and transitions in adolescence remain elusive. Furthermore, this study tested the roles of gender, risk, and individual differences in empathy, impulsivity, and antisocial tendencies in trust and reciprocity. Results indicate stability in trust and a decrease in reciprocity across adolescence, but also show that trust and reciprocity choices were influenced by risk, and that empathy mediated the age-related decrease in reciprocity.

Predicting reading and mathematics from neural activity for feedback learning.

Although many studies use feedback learning paradigms to study the process of learning in laboratory settings, little is known about their relevance for real-world learning settings such as school. In a large developmental sample (N = 228, 8-25 years), we investigated whether performance and neural activity during a feedback learning task predicted reading and mathematics performance 2 years later. The results indicated that feedback learning performance predicted both reading and mathematics performance.

Rejection in Bargaining Situations: An Event-Related Potential Study in Adolescents and Adults.

The neural correlates of rejection in bargaining situations when proposing a fair or unfair offer are not yet well understood. We measured neural responses to rejection and acceptance of monetary offers with event-related potentials (ERPs) in mid-adolescents (14-17 years) and early adults (19-24 years). Participants played multiple rounds of the Ultimatum Game as proposers, dividing coins between themselves and a second player (responder) by making a choice between an unfair distribution (7 coins for proposer and 3 for responder; 7/3) and one of two alternatives: a fair distribution (5/5) or a hyperfair distribution (3/7).

The relation between gray matter morphology and divergent thinking in adolescents and young adults.

Adolescence and early adulthood are developmental time periods during which creative cognition is highly important for adapting to environmental changes. Divergent thinking, which refers to generating novel and useful solutions to open-ended problems, has often been used as a measure of creative cognition. The first goal of this structural neuroimaging study was to elucidate the relationship between gray matter morphology and performance in the verbal (AUT; alternative uses task) and visuo-spatial (CAT; creative ability test) domain of divergent thinking in adolescents and young adults.

Corrigendum: Number-induced shifts in spatial attention: a replication study.

[This corrects the article on p. 987 in vol. 5, PMID: 25309472.

Number-induced shifts in spatial attention: a replication study.

In a spatial attention paradigm, Fischer et al. (2003) showed that merely perceiving a number shifted attention according to the magnitude of the number. Low numbers shifted attention to the left and high numbers shifted attention to the right.

The relation between resting state connectivity and creativity in adolescents before and after training.

An important component of creativity is divergent thinking, which involves the ability to generate novel and useful problem solutions. In this study, we tested the relation between resting-state functional connectivity of brain areas activated during a divergent thinking task (i.e.

Mighty metaphors: behavioral and ERP evidence that power shifts attention on a vertical dimension.

Thinking about the abstract concept power may automatically activate the spatial up-down image schema (powerful up; powerless down) and consequently direct spatial attention to the image schema-congruent location. Participants indicated whether a word represented a powerful or powerless person (e.g.

Congruency between Word Position and Meaning is Caused by Task-Induced Spatial Attention.

We report an experiment that compared two explanations for the effect of congruency between a word's on screen spatial position and its meaning. On one account, congruency is explained by the match between position and a mental simulation of meaning. Alternatively, congruency is explained by the polarity alignment principle.

What motivates the adolescent? Brain regions mediating reward sensitivity across adolescence.

The relation between brain development across adolescence and adolescent risky behavior has attracted increasing interest in recent years. It has been proposed that adolescents are hypersensitive to reward because of an imbalance in the developmental pattern followed by the striatum and prefrontal cortex. To date, it is unclear if adolescents engage in risky behavior because they overestimate potential rewards or respond more to received rewards and whether these effects occur in the absence of decisions.

Evaluating the negative or valuing the positive? Neural mechanisms supporting feedback-based learning across development.

How children learn from positive and negative performance feedback lies at the foundation of successful learning and is therefore of great importance for educational practice. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural developmental changes related to feedback-based learning when performing a rule search and application task. Behavioral results from three age groups (8-9, 11-13, and 18-25 years of age) demonstrated that, compared with adults, 8- to 9-year-old children performed disproportionally more inaccurately after receiving negative feedback relative to positive feedback.

Neural mechanisms supporting flexible performance adjustment during development.

Feedback processing is crucial for successful performance adjustment following changing task demands. The present event-related fMRI study was aimed at investigating the developmental differences in brain regions associated with different aspects of feedback processing. Children age 8-11, adolescents age 14-15, and adults age 18-24 performed a rule switch task resembling the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, and analyses focused on different types of negative and positive feedback.

Switching between colors and shapes on the basis of positive and negative feedback: an fMRI and EEG study on feedback-based learning.

A crucial element of testing hypotheses about rules for behavior is the use of performance feedback. In this study, we used fMRI and EEG to test the role of medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and dorsolateral (DL) PFC in hypothesis testing using a modified intradimensional/extradimensional rule shift task. Eighteen adults were asked to infer rules about color or shape on the basis of positive and negative feedback in sets of two trials.

Verifying visual properties in sentence verification facilitates picture recognition memory.

According to the perceptual symbols theory (Barsalou, 1999), sensorimotor simulations underlie the representation of concepts. We investigated whether recognition memory for pictures of concepts was facilitated by earlier representation of visual properties of those concepts. During study, concept names (e.

A heart rate analysis of developmental change in feedback processing and rule shifting from childhood to early adulthood.

Over the course of development, the ability to switch between different tasks on the basis of feedback cues increases profoundly, but the role of performance monitoring remains unclear. Heart rate indexes can provide critical information about how individuals monitor feedback cues indicating that performance should be adjusted. In this study, children of three age groups (8-10, 12-14, and 16-18 years) performed a rule change task in which sorting rules needed to be detected following positive or negative feedback.