Guest Presenter: Katie Insel
Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Talk Title: How adolescent neurodevelopment shapes goal directed behavior
Abstract: Adolescence is a period of the lifespan accompanied by ongoing brain maturation, which may remodel motivation and behavior in daily life. This talk will examine how adolescent neurodevelopment shapes the maturation of goal directed behavior when rewards and punishments are at stake. In the first part of this talk, I will discuss how incentive stakes influence cognitive control across development. Results revealed that when stakes are high, adults selectively enhance cognitive control performance, but adolescents do not. This late maturing behavior was mediated by emerging neurodevelopmental changes in functional connectivity between the ventral striatum and lateral prefrontal cortex. While older individuals increased connectivity during high stakes, younger adolescents did not exhibit stakes-selective changes in connectivity, presumably due to ongoing coritcostriatal development. In the second part of this talk, I will present a study examining how motivational context influences goal directed reinforcement learning across adolescence. Results reveal that the ability to learn from high value monetary gains and losses shifts across adolescence, and these behavioral changes are paralleled by age-related differences value-selective signals in the ventral striatum. Together, these findings identify situational factors and neurodevelopmental constraints that may shape adolescents’ ability to maximize their goal directed behavior.
The workshop is open to all. Research assistants, graduate students and postdocs are encouraged to attend. Workshops are taking on a new format this semester- they will involve a short presentation of work (15-25 minutes) with an extended discussion at the end. The presentations will be live-streamed and recorded in collaboration with the OnNeuro platform, check it out here!
Miss it or want to watch it again? Check out Katie’s talk here!