Citation

McCormick EM, Perino MT, Telzer EH. Dev. Cogn. Neurosci. 2018; 30: 134-141.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, United States. Electronic address: ehtelzer@unc.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.dcn.2018.01.012

PMID

29518712

Abstract

Adolescence is a period of sensitivity to social stimuli. In particular, research has focused on the increased sensitivity to risks and social information seen during adolescence. However, recent evidence also suggests that adolescents can flexibly use information in service of their goals, raising an interesting question: are adolescents able to selectively discount social information if it conflicts with their goals? To test this question, fifty-five children and adolescents (ages 8-17 years) completed a social variant of the Balloon Analogue Risk Task during an fMRI session. Adolescents showed decreased tracking of negative social feedback in regions involved in salience-monitoring (e.g. insula) and social processing (e.g., TPJ, pSTS). Age-related changes in neural processing of risk and social feedback contributed to better performance for older participants. These results suggest that adolescents are able to suppress goal-irrelevant social feedback, rather than being uniformly hyper-sensitive to social information.

Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Adolescence; Insula; Risk-taking; Social sensitivity; TPJ