A brief child-friendly reward task reliably activates the ventral striatum in two samples of socioeconomically diverse youth.

ABSTRACT: Adolescence is a period of increased risk-taking behavior, thought to be driven, in part, by heightened reward sensitivity. One challenge of studying reward processing in the field of developmental neuroscience is finding a task that activates reward circuitry, and is short, not too complex, and engaging for youth of a wide variety of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. In the present study, we tested a brief child-friendly reward task for activating reward circuitry in two independent samples of youth ages 7-19 years old enriched for poverty (study 1: n = 464; study 2: n = 27). The reward task robustly activated the ventral striatum, with activation decreasing from early to mid-adolescence and increasing from mid- to late adolescence in response to reward. This response did not vary by ge

SUBMITTER: Peckins MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8812963 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature