Neural activity moderates the association between sleep and risky driving behaviors in adolescence

The biological, environmental, and psychosocial changes that occur in adolescence engender an increase in risk taking often linked to the high rates of motor vehicle crashes amongst young drivers. Most U.S. adolescents suffer from poor sleep, which is known to exacerbate the risk of driving crashes; however, research has yet to uncover a neurobiological link between sleep and risky driving in adolescence. Here, we examined potential moderators of the sleep-risk relation in fifty-six adolescents (14-18y/o) as they completed a driving task during fMRI. While poor sleep was associated with increased risky driving (i.e., running more yellow lights), good sleep emerged as a novel buffer against risky driving in lower sensation-seeking adolescents. Neural activity in the ventral striatum (VS), a key node of the risk-taking circuit, also moderated the sleep-risk association: sleep was related to risk-taking in individuals demonstrating high, but not low, VS response during risky decision-making, suggesting that reward-related neural response may underly the connection between sleep and risk-taking in adolescence. This study sheds light on the risk of driving crashes in youth by highlighting sleep as both an exacerbator and a buffer of risky driving in adolescence. Taken together, these results underscore the importance of improving adolescent sleep.

Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams

Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses1. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data. This flexibility resulted in sizeable variation in the results of hypothesis tests, even for teams whose statistical maps were highly correlated at intermediate stages of the analysis pipeline. Variation in reported results was related to several aspects of analysis methodology. Notably, a meta-analytical approach that aggregated information across teams yielded a significant consensus in activated regions. Furthermore, prediction markets of researchers in the field revealed an overestimation of the likelihood of significant findings, even by researchers with direct knowledge of the dataset2-5. Our findings show that analytical flexibility can have substantial effects on scientific conclusions, and identify factors that may be related to variability in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results emphasize the importance of validating and sharing complex analysis workflows, and demonstrate the need for performing and reporting multiple analyses of the same data. Potential approaches that could be used to mitigate issues related to analytical variability are discussed.

Longitudinal Trajectories of Post-Election Distress Track Changes in Neural and Psychological Functioning

The shift in political climate after the 2016 U.S. presidential election had a distressing effect on many individuals. To date, no research has identified how changes in societal-level distressing experiences affected ongoing neurobiological and psychological functioning. Fifty-five participants (M_age = 21.746, 37 women) were tested at two time points. fMRI and psychological measures were used to test the hypotheses that increases in distress over 1 year would relate to worsening mental health symptomology and blunted neurobiological response to reward during the same period. Because individual experiences of distress occurred within a larger macroclimate of societal attitudes, measures were standardized to reflect relative change within the sample. Distress changes over 1 year were positively associated with problematic mental health symptomology and nucleus accumbens (NAcc) response to reward, with dissociable effects for anticipation and outcome. Worsening distress was associated with increased NAcc response to reward anticipation but decreased NAcc response to reward outcome. Individuals who exhibited increased sensitivity to anticipatory reward were those who exhibited more avoidance distress symptoms, whereas intrusion and hyperarousal were associated with decreased sensitivity to reward outcome. This study highlights the importance of considering individual variation in profiles of change in response to ongoing distress, suggests that individual response styles yield differences in reward sensitivity, and extends neurobiological understanding of exposure to stressful life experiences to political events.

Neural recruitment related to threat perception differs as a function of adolescent sleep

Detecting threat cues in the environment is an important aspect of social functioning. This is particularly true for adolescents as social threats become more salient and they navigate increasingly complex relationships outside of the family. Sleep relates to socioemotional processing throughout development, but the neurobiological relevance of sleep for threat perceptions in adolescence remains unknown. In the present study, 46 human adolescents (aged 14-18 years; 26 female) made judgments while undergoing a brain scan about whether unfamiliar, affectively neutral, computer-generated faces were threatening. Prior to the scan, several indices of sleep were assessed nightly for two-weeks using actigraphy. Sleep duration and poor sleep quality (defined as less efficiency, more awakenings, longer awakenings), factors influenced by biological and psychosocial changes during adolescence, elicited distinct neural activation patterns. Sleep duration was positively associated with activation in visual and face processing regions (occipital cortex, occipital fusiform gyrus), and this activation was linked to increased threat detection during the threat perception task. Sleep quality was negatively related to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation, which moderated the relation between reaction time (RT) and exposure to faces. Findings suggest reduced threat perception for adolescents with shorter sleep durations and more impulsive responding (as evinced by less consistent RT) for adolescents experiencing worse quality sleep. This study identifies an association between sleep and neural functioning relevant for socioemotional decision making during adolescence, a time when these systems undergo significant development.

Distinct and similar patterns of emotional development in adolescents and young adults

Adolescence is a developmental period of increased sensitivity to social emotional cues, but it is less known whether young adults demonstrate similar social emotional sensitivity. The current study tested variation in reaction times to emotional face cues during different phases of emotional development. Ex‐Gaussian parameters mu, sigma, and tau were computed, in addition to mean, median and standard deviation (SD) in reaction times (RT) during an emotional go/nogo‐paradigm with fearful, happy, and calm facial expressions in 377 participants, 6–30 years of age. Across development, mean RT showed slowing to fearful facial expressions relative to both calm and happy facial cues, but mu revealed that this pattern was specific to adolescence. In young adulthood, increased variability to fearful expressions relative to both happy and calm ones was captured by SD and tau. The findings that adolescents had longer response latencies to fearful faces, whereas young adults demonstrated greater response variability to fearful faces, together reflect how social emotional processing continues to evolve from adolescence into early adulthood. The findings suggest that young adulthood is also a vulnerable period for processing social emotional cues that ultimately may be important to better understand why different psychopathologies emerge in early adulthood.

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis Reveals a Neural Phenotype for Trust Bias in Adolescents

The extent to which individuals are inclined to judge unfamiliar others as trustworthy can have important implications for social functioning. Using multivariate pattern analysis, a neural phenotype of trust bias was identified in 48 human adolescents (ages 14-18 years, 26 female). Adolescents who exhibited more similar brain response to faces at the extremes of a trustworthy gradient were more likely to rate neutral faces as trustworthy. This relation between neural pattern representation and trust bias was evinced in the amygdala. Amygdala-insula connectivity dissimilarity to faces at the extremes of the trustworthy gradient was associated with greater trust bias to neutral faces, serving as a distinct circuit-level contributor to decision-making over and above of amygdala pattern similarity. These findings aid understanding of neural mechanisms contributing to individual differences in social evaluations of ambiguity.

Heterogeneous Catalysis with Basic Compounds to Achieve the Synthesis and C–N Cleavage of Azetidin-2-ones under Microwave Irradiation

The synthesis of azetidin-2-ones with a completely heterogeneous catalysis is reported. The use of basic compounds as solid catalysts allowed for the synthesis of azetidin-2-ones under microwave irradiation without organic additives such as triethylamine. An excellent catalyst for this transformation was Mg-Al hydroxide (MAH). The present methodology offers the advantages of non-hazardous reaction conditions, short reaction times, high yields, and catalyst reusability. Different substitution groups were tested on the imines and acyl chlorides to explore the scope of the reaction. Unconventional N–C4 bond cleavage was detected in azetidin-2-ones. MAH was characterized by N2 adsorption–desorption, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM).

Worth working for: The influence of effort costs on teens' choices during a novel decision making game

Decision making requires consideration of both the benefits of a given choice and the costs, which can include risk, delay, and effort. Previous research has examined the developmental trajectory of adolescent decision making regarding risk and delay; however, the effects of effort on adolescent decision making remain largely unexplored. In the present study, we pilot tested a novel, developmentally-appropriate task designed to examine developmental differences in the willingness to expend effort during goal pursuit in adolescents (ages 13-16, n = 23) versus young adults (ages 18-23, n = 25). Self-reported reward responsivity correlated with task-related parameter estimates for effort and reward, providing evidence of task validity. Adolescents exhibited reduced sensitivity to physical effort costs compared to adults, effects which did not appear to be driven by differences in subjective task motivation or awareness of the effort requirements. These findings provide preliminary evidence that adolescence may be a time of increased willingness to expend effort during goal pursuit. Effort-based decision making is an understudied but exciting avenue for developmental research, as the willingness to engage in effortful pursuit of new experiences during adolescence may help to facilitate the path to independence.

Neurobiological responses in the adolescent striatum to being 'tested'

While emerging research implicates the striatum in adolescents' ability to learn from feedback, little is known about how motivational contexts, such as emphasizing the evaluative nature of learning tasks, modulate adolescents' striatal learning. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging during a feedback-based learning task, in conjunction with a within-subject evaluative threat manipulation, to determine whether evaluation threat influences behavioral and neural responses to feedback in adolescents. On average, adolescents were less sensitive than adults to the evaluation threat. In the adolescents, the effect of evaluation threat on performance was tracked with the striatal response to performance feedback during the evaluation threat condition, such that greater striatal sensitivity correlated with greater gains in learning performance. Our findings suggest that variability in how adolescents respond to a contextual threat of evaluation and associated striatal sensitivity can facilitate enhanced learning.

Parents Versus Peers: Assessing the Impact of Social Agents on Decision Making in Young Adults

Young adulthood is a developmental phase when individuals must navigate a changing social milieu that involves considering how their decisions affect close others such as parents and peers. To date, no empirical work has directly evaluated how young adults weigh these relationships against one another. We conducted a preregistered experiment in which we pitted outcomes for parents against outcomes for friends. Participants ( N = 174, ages 18-30 years) played two runs of the Columbia Card Task-one in which gains benefited a parent and losses were incurred by a friend and another in which the opposite was true. We also tested whether age, relationship quality, and reward type earned for parents and friends (simulated vs. real) acted as moderating influences on parent-friend prioritization. Results showed that individuals were more likely to make decisions that benefited a parent at the expense of a friend. Relationship quality and reward type moderated this effect, whereas age did not.

Sleep quality and adolescent default mode network connectivity

Sleep suffers during adolescence and is related to academic, emotional and social behaviors. How this normative change relates to ongoing brain development remains unresolved. The default mode network (DMN), a large-scale brain network important for complex cognition and socioemotional processing, undergoes intra-network integration and inter-network segregation during adolescence. Using resting state functional connectivity and actigraphy over 14 days, we examined correlates of naturalistic individual differences in sleep duration and quality in the DMN at rest in 45 human adolescents (ages 14-18). Variation in sleep quality, but not duration, was related to weaker intrinsic DMN connectivity, such that those with worse quality sleep evinced weaker intra-network connectivity at rest. These novel findings suggest sleep quality, a relatively unexplored sleep index, is related to adolescent brain function in a network that contributes to behavioral maturation and undergoes development during adolescence.

Broadening the Impact of Developmental Neuroscience on the Study of Adolescence

Having been a significance source of the renewed interested in the adolescent period, developmental neuroscience now needs to build upon its achievements to date and expand in several areas in order to broaden its impact upon the field. Addressing both typical and atypical development, examining the interaction between brain development and the social environment, studying change over time, and including attention to population diversity can help to produce a truly integrative science of adolescent development. The papers in the special section provide nice examples of how developmental neuroscience can make such expansions and continue to contribute to the field in the years to come.

Combined effects of peer presence, social cues, and rewards on cognitive control in adolescents

Developmental scientists have examined the independent effects of peer presence, social cues, and rewards on adolescent decision-making and cognitive control. Yet, these contextual factors often co-occur in real world social situations. The current study examined the combined effects of all three factors on cognitive control, and its underlying neural circuitry, using a task to better capture adolescents' real world social interactions. A sample of 176 participants ages 13-25, was scanned while performing an adapted go/no-go task alone or in the presence of a virtual peer. The task included brief positive social cues and sustained periods of positive arousal. Adolescents showed diminished cognitive control to positive social cues when anticipating a reward in the presence of peers relative to when alone, a pattern not observed in older participants. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by enhanced orbitofrontal activation. The results demonstrate the synergistic impact of social and reward influences on cognitive control in adolescents.

Greater response variability in adolescents is associated with increased white matter development

Adolescence is a period of learning, exploration, and continuous adaptation to fluctuating environments. Response variability during adolescence is an important, understudied, and developmentally appropriate behavior. The purpose of this study was to identify the association between performance on a dynamic risky decision making task and white matter microstructure in a sample of 48 adolescents (14–16 years). Individuals with the greatest response variability on the task obtained the widest range of experience with potential outcomes to risky choice. When compared with their more behaviorally consistent peers, adolescents with greater response variability rated real-world examples of risk taking behaviors as less risky via self-report. Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) were used to examine fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD). Greater FA in long-range, late-maturing tracts was associated with higher response variability. Greater FA and lower MD were associated with lower riskiness ratings of real-world risky behaviors. Results suggest that response variability and lower perceived risk attitudes of real-world risk are supported by neural maturation in adolescents.

An Upside to Reward Sensitivity: The Hippocampus Supports Enhanced Reinforcement Learning in Adolescence

Adolescents are notorious for engaging in reward-seeking behaviors, a tendency attributed to heightened activity in the brain's reward systems during adolescence. It has been suggested that reward sensitivity in adolescence might be adaptive, but evidence of an adaptive role has been scarce. Using a probabilistic reinforcement learning task combined with reinforcement learning models and fMRI, we found that adolescents showed better reinforcement learning and a stronger link between reinforcement learning and episodic memory for rewarding outcomes. This behavioral benefit was related to heightened prediction error-related BOLD activity in the hippocampus and to stronger functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the striatum at the time of reinforcement. These findings reveal an important role for the hippocampus in reinforcement learning in adolescence and suggest that reward sensitivity in adolescence is related to adaptive differences in how adolescents learn from experience.

Neural connectivity moderates the association between sleep and impulsivity in adolescents

Adolescence is characterized by chronic insufficient sleep and extensive brain development, but the relation between adolescent sleep and brain function remains unclear. We report the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study to investigate functional connectivity as a moderator between sleep and impulsivity, a problematic behavior during this developmental period. Naturalistic differences in sleep have not yet been explored as treatable contributors to adolescent impulsivity. Although public and scientific attention focuses on sleep duration, we report individual differences in sleep quality, not duration, in fifty-five adolescents (ages 14-18) yielded significant differences in functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and default mode network. Poor sleep quality was related to greater affect-related impulsivity among adolescents with low, but not high, connectivity, suggesting neural functioning relates to individual differences linking sleep quality and impulsivity. Response inhibition and cognitive impulsivity were not related to sleep quality, suggesting that sleep has a greater impact on affect-related impulsivity. Exploring environmental contributors of poor sleep quality, we demonstrated pillow comfort was uniquely related to sleep quality over age, sex, and income, a promising advance ripe for intervention.

Becoming a sexual being: The 'elephant in the room' of adolescent brain development

The onset of adolescence is a time of profound changes in motivation, cognition, behavior, and social relationships. Existing neurodevelopmental models have integrated our current understanding of adolescent brain development; however, there has been surprisingly little focus on the importance of adolescence as a sensitive period for romantic and sexual development. As young people enter adolescence, one of their primary tasks is to gain knowledge and experience that will allow them to take on the social roles of adults, including engaging in romantic and sexual relationships. By reviewing the relevant human and animal neurodevelopmental literature, this paper highlights how we should move beyond thinking of puberty as simply a set of somatic changes that are critical for physical reproductive maturation. Rather, puberty also involves a set of neurobiological changes that are critical for the social, emotional, and cognitive maturation necessary for reproductive success. The primary goal of this paper is to broaden the research base and dialogue about adolescent romantic and sexual development, in hopes of advancing understanding of sex and romance as important developmental dimensions of health and well-being in adolescence.

Frontostriatal development and probabilistic reinforcement learning during adolescence

Adolescence has traditionally been viewed as a period of vulnerability to increased risk-taking and adverse outcomes, which have been linked to neurobiological maturation of the frontostriatal reward system. However, growing research on the role of developmental changes in the adolescent frontostriatal system in facilitating learning will provide a more nuanced view of adolescence. In this review, we discuss the implications of existing research on this topic for learning during adolescence, and suggest that the very neural changes that render adolescents vulnerable to social pressure and risky decision making may also stand to play a role in scaffolding the ability to learn from rewards and from performance-related feedback.

At risk of being risky: The relationship between "brain age" under emotional states and risk preference

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Multivariate-analyses significantly predict age in randomized train & test groups using pseudo-resting state data.

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Emotional states affect underlying functional connectivity and lead to changes in an individual’s predicted “brain age”.

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Under emotional states adolescents on average demonstrated a reduction in “brain age” from their true age (i.e., a younger brain phenotype).

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On average, a phenotype of a younger “brain age” during emotional states, relative to a neutral state is related to risk preference and perception.

Developmental differences regarding decision making are often reported in the absence of emotional stimuli and without context, failing to explain why some individuals are more likely to have a greater inclination toward risk. The current study (N = 212; 10–25y) examined the influence of emotional context on underlying functional brain connectivity over development and its impact on risk preference. Using functional imaging data in a neutral brain-state we first identify the “brain age” of a given individual then validate it with an independent measure of cortical thickness. We then show, on average, that “brain age” across the group during the teen years has the propensity to look younger in emotional contexts. Further, we show this phenotype (i.e. a younger brain age in emotional contexts) relates to a group mean difference in risk perception − a pattern exemplified greatest in young-adults (ages 18–21). The results are suggestive of a specified functional brain phenotype that relates to being at “risk to be risky.”

Stress and the adolescent brain: Amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry and ventral striatum as developmental targets

Adolescence is a time in development when significant changes occur in affective neurobiology. These changes provide a prolonged period of plasticity to prepare the individual for independence. However, they also render the system highly vulnerable to the effects of environmental stress exposures. Here, we review the human literature on the associations between stress-exposure and developmental changes in amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and ventral striatal dopaminergic systems during the adolescent period. Despite the vast differences in types of adverse exposures presented in his review, these neurobiological systems appear consistently vulnerable to stress experienced during development, providing putative mechanisms to explain why affective processes that emerge during adolescence are particularly sensitive to environmental influences.