Longitudinal Changes in Prefrontal Cortex Activation Underlie Declines in Adolescent Risk Taking.

Abstract

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by steep increases in risk-taking behavior coupled with dramatic brain changes. Although theories propose that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) may influence adolescent risk taking, the specific ways in which it functions remain unclear. We report the first longitudinal functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine how neural activation during risk taking changes over time and contributes to adolescents' real-life risk-taking behavior. We find that longitudinal declines in activation of the ventrolateral PFC are linked to declines in adolescent risk taking, whereas the medial PFC influences adolescent risk taking via its functional neural coupling with reward-related regions. This is the first study to identify the mechanism by which different regions of the PFC disparately contribute to declines in risk taking.