Abstract
Adolescence is an essential developmental period characterized by reward-related processes. The current study investigated the development of monetary and social reward processes in adolescents compared with that in children and adults; furthermore, it assessed whether adolescents had different levels of sensitivity to various types of rewards. Two adapted incentive delay tasks were employed for each participant, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. The behavioral results showed that both monetary and social rewards could motivate response speed, and participants were more accurate under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The behavioral performances of individuals increased with age. For the ERP data, the cue-P3, target-P2, target-P3 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) components were investigated to identify reward motivation, emotional arousal, attention allocation and feedback processing. Children and adolescents showed higher motivation (larger cue-P3) to rewards than adults. Adolescents showed larger emotional responses to rewards; that is, they had larger target-P2 amplitudes than adults and shorter target-P2 latencies than children. Children showed stronger emotional reactivity for monetary rewards than for social rewards. All age groups had stronger attentional control (larger target-P3) under the monetary reward condition than under the social reward condition. The present study sheds light on the neurodevelopment of reward processes in children, adolescents and adults and shows that various reward process stages demonstrate different age-related and reward-type-related characteristics.
Highlights
Reaction Time The results indicated a main effect of Age group, F(2,87) = 68.06, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.61; the post hoc comparisons indicated significantly faster reaction times (RTs) for adults [t(58) = −9.97, p < 0.001] and adolescents [t(58) = −10.23, p < 0.001] than for children
A main effect of Reward magnitude was identified, F(2,174) = 18.72, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.18, and the cue-P3 amplitude was larger in the high reward condition than that in the low and non-reward conditions
The current findings offer the clinical implications that social rewards could be used to motivate adolescents’ behaviors, and that monetary rewards might be more effective than social rewards for children and adults
Summary
Adolescence is an essential developmental period characterized by remarkable changes in physical, brain structural domains and hormonal levels, and these changes may further affect adolescents’ functional responsiveness and even behaviors (Steinberg, 2005; Blakemore and Choudhury, 2006; Blakemore, 2008; Casey et al, 2008, 2011; Burnett et al, 2011; Luking et al, 2019; Poon et al, 2019). Reward system is considered to develop non-linearly (Ernst et al, 2005; Bjork et al, 2010; Somerville and Casey, 2010; Blakemore and Robbins, 2012; Albert et al, 2013; Lamm et al, 2014; Luking, 2015; Ethridge et al, 2017; Kujawa et al, 2018). Abnormal reward process development has been widely seen in children and adolescents with depression (Bress et al, 2015; Luking et al, 2016), autism spectrum disorder (Cox et al, 2015), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Gonzalez-Gadea et al, 2016), and some other conduct behaviors (Sheffield et al, 2015; Li et al, 2020)
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