Juliet Davidow

Date: 

Thursday, November 1, 2018, 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Location: 

Room 105 William James Hall

Adolescent learning and goal-directed behavior: Advantages and challenges of a developing brain

Juliet Davidow
Postdoctoral Fellow, Somerville Lab

Adolescence is a phase of the lifespan characterized by dynamic, ongoing brain and psychological development. The unique developmental profile of adolescents has been associated with risk for negative outcomes including risky, shortsighted actions, driven by biased interactions among the brain’s striatocortical circuitry. However, these brain systems support a range of functions that extend beyond propelling risky actions, including motivation and flexible action selection for goals. Could these very same neurodevelopmental processes confer benefits for related behaviors such as learning? My work highlights both the advantages and disadvantages that arise from ongoing neurodevelopment of striatocortical circuitry and its interactions with other neural systems during adolescence. Using fMRI and computational modeling approaches, I have revealed that adolescents use superior learning strategies compared to adults in certain contexts, a behavioral profile that is supported by stronger interactions among multiple learning systems in the brain, including the hippocampus. However, adolescents’ highly attuned learning carries disadvantages in other contexts, such as when previous learning interacts with inhibitory demands – a set of processes requiring interactions among late-developing lateral and medial prefrontal cortical regions. Taken together, this research illustrates both the advantages and challenges that arise from emerging functional orchestration of the brain during adolescence. This work contributes to a more complete characterization of this time of transition from childhood to adulthood.