Not Doomed to Repeat: Enhanced Medial Prefrontal Cortex Tracking of Errors Promotes Adaptive Behavior during Adolescence

Neural tracking of social hierarchies in adolescents' real-world social networks

In the current study, we combined sociometric nominations and neuroimaging techniques to examine adolescents' neural tracking of peers from their real-world social network that varied in social preferences and popularity. Adolescent participants from an entire school district (N = 873) completed peer sociometric nominations of their grade at school, and a subset of participants (N = 117, Mage = 13.59 years) completed a neuroimaging task in which they viewed peer faces from their social networks. We revealed two neural processes by which adolescents track social preference: (1) the fusiform face area, an important region for early visual perception and social categorization, simultaneously represented both peers high in social preference and low in social preference; (2) the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which was differentially engaged in tracking peers high and low in social preference. No regions specifically tracked peers high in popularity and only the inferior parietal lobe, temporoparietal junction, midcingulate cortex and insula were involved in tracking unpopular peers. This is the first study to examine the neural circuits that support adolescents' perception of peer-based social networks. These findings identify the neural processes that allow youths to spontaneously keep track of peers' social value within their social network.

Longitudinal network re-organization across learning and development

While it is well understood that the brain experiences changes across short-term experience/learning and long-term development, it is unclear how these two mechanisms interact to produce developmental outcomes. Here we test an interactive model of learning and development where certain learning-related changes are constrained by developmental changes in the brain against an alternative development-as-practice model where outcomes are determined primarily by the accumulation of experience regardless of age. Participants (8-29 years) participated in a three-wave, accelerated longitudinal study during which they completed a feedback learning task during an fMRI scan. Adopting a novel longitudinal modeling approach, we probed the unique and moderated effects of learning, experience, and development simultaneously on behavioral performance and network modularity during the task. We found nonlinear patterns of development for both behavior and brain, and that greater experience supported increased learning and network modularity relative to naïve subjects. We also found changing brain-behavior relationships across adolescent development, where heightened network modularity predicted improved learning, but only following the transition from adolescence to young adulthood. These results present compelling support for an interactive view of experience and development, where changes in the brain impact behavior in context-specific fashion based on developmental goals.

Meta-analytic evidence for a joint neural mechanism underlying response inhibition and state anger

Although anger may weaken response inhibition (RI) by allowing outbursts to bypass deliberate processing, it is equally likely that RI deficits precipitate a state of anger (SA). In adolescents, for instance, anger occurs more frequently and often leads to escalating aggressive behaviors. Even though RI is considered a key component in explaining individual differences in SA expression, the neural overlap between SA and RI remains elusive. Here, we aimed to meta-analytically revisit and update the neural correlates of motor RI, to determine a consistent neural architecture of SA, and to identify their joint neural network. Considering that inhibitory abilities follow a protracted maturation until early adulthood, we additionally computed RI meta-analyses in youths and adults. Using activation likelihood estimation, we calculated twelve meta-analyses across 157 RI and 39 SA experiments on healthy individuals. Consistent with previous findings, RI was associated with a broad frontoparietal network including the anterior insula/inferior frontal gyrus (aI/IFG), premotor and midcingulate cortices, extending into right temporoparietal areas. Youths showed convergent activity in right midcingulate and medial prefrontal areas, left aI/IFG, and the temporal poles. SA, on the other hand, reliably recruited the right aI/IFG and anterior cingulate cortex. Conjunction analyses between RI and SA yielded a single convergence cluster in the right aI/IFG. While frontoparietal networks and bilateral aI are ubiquitously recruited during RI, the right aI/IFG cluster likely represents a node in a dynamically-adjusting monitoring network that integrates salient information thereby facilitating the execution of goal-directed behaviors under highly unpredictable scenarios.

TEAMwork: Testing Emotional Attunement and Mutuality During Parent-Adolescent fMRI

The parent-child relationship and family context influence the development of emotion regulation (ER) brain circuitry and related skills in children and adolescents. Although both parents' and children's ER neurocircuitry simultaneously affect how they interact with one another, neuroimaging studies of parent-child relationships typically include only one member of the dyad in brain imaging procedures. The current study examined brain activation related to parenting and ER in parent-adolescent dyads during concurrent fMRI scanning with a novel task - the Testing Emotional Attunement and Mutuality (TEAM) task. The TEAM task includes feedback trials indicating the other dyad member made an error, resulting in a monetary loss for both participants. Results indicate that positive parenting practices as reported by the adolescent were positively correlated with parents' hemodynamic activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region related to empathy, during these error trials. Additionally, during feedback conditions both parents and adolescents exhibited fMRI activation in ER-related regions, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior insula, fusiform gyrus, thalamus, caudate, precuneus, and superior parietal lobule. Adolescents had higher left amygdala activation than parents during the feedback condition. These findings demonstrate the utility of dyadic fMRI scanning for investigating relational processes, particularly in the parent-child relationship.

Always on my mind: Cross-brain associations of mental health symptoms during simultaneous parent-child scanning

How parents manifest symptoms of anxiety or depression may affect how children learn to modulate their own distress, thereby influencing the children's risk for developing an anxiety or mood disorder. Conversely, children's mental health symptoms may impact parents' experiences of negative emotions. Therefore, mental health symptoms can have bidirectional effects in parent-child relationships, particularly during moments of distress or frustration (e.g., when a parent or child makes a costly mistake). The present study used simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of parent-adolescent dyads to examine how brain activity when responding to each other's costly errors (i.e., dyadic error processing) may be associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. While undergoing simultaneous fMRI scans, healthy dyads completed a task involving feigned errors that indicated their family member made a costly mistake. Inter-brain, random-effects multivariate modeling revealed that parents who exhibited decreased medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex activation when viewing their child's costly error response had children with more symptoms of depression and anxiety. Adolescents with increased anterior insula activation when viewing a costly error made by their parent had more anxious parents. These results reveal cross-brain associations between mental health symptomatology and brain activity during parent-child dyadic error processing.

Apples to apples? Neural correlates of emotion regulation differences between high- and low-risk adolescents

Adolescence has been noted as a period of increased risk taking. The literature on normative neurodevelopment implicates aberrant activation of affective and regulatory regions as key to inhibitory failures. However, many of these studies have not included adolescents engaging in high rates of risky behavior, making generalizations to the most at-risk populations potentially problematic. We conducted a comparative study of nondelinquent community (n = 24, mean age = 15.8 years, 12 female) and delinquent adolescents (n = 24, mean age = 16.2 years, 12 female) who completed a cognitive control task during functional magnetic resonance imaging, where behavioral inhibition was assessed in the presence of appetitive and aversive socioaffective cues. Community adolescents showed poorer behavioral regulation to appetitive relative to aversive cues, whereas the delinquent sample showed the opposite pattern. Recruitment of the inferior frontal gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and tempoparietal junction differentiated community and high-risk adolescents, as delinquent adolescents showed significantly greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of aversive cues, while the community sample showed greater recruitment when inhibiting their responses in the presence of appetitive cues. Accounting for behavioral history may be key in understanding when adolescents will have regulatory difficulties, highlighting a need for comparative research into normative and nonnormative risk-taking trajectories.

Contributions of default mode network stability and deactivation to adolescent task engagement

Out of the several intrinsic brain networks discovered through resting-state functional analyses in the past decade, the default mode network (DMN) has been the subject of intense interest and study. In particular, the DMN shows marked suppression during task engagement, and has led to hypothesized roles in internally-directed cognition that need to be down-regulated in order to perform goal-directed behaviors. Previous work has largely focused on univariate deactivation as the mechanism of DMN suppression. However, given the transient nature of DMN down-regulation during task, an important question arises: Does the DMN need to be strongly, or more stably suppressed to promote successful task learning? In order to explore this question, 65 adolescents (M_age = 13.32; 21 females) completed a risky decision-making task during an fMRI scan. We tested our primary question by examining individual differences in absolute level of deactivation against the stability of activation across time in predicting levels of feedback learning on the task. To measure stability, we utilized a model-based functional connectivity approach that estimates the stability of activation across time within a region. In line with our hypothesis, the stability of activation in default mode regions predicted task engagement over and above the absolute level of DMN deactivation, revealing a new mechanism by which the brain can suppress the influence of brain networks on behavior. These results also highlight the importance of adopting model-based network approaches to understand the functional dynamics of the brain.