ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2020
Distentangling the systems contributing to changes in learning during adolescence.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reward-specific learning parameters change across normative adolescent development and are blunted in youth with high risk for depression.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Modeling human synchronization to rhythmic patterns with varying statistical regularities.Acta psychologica · 2026Article
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- A habit and working memory model as an alternative account of human reward-based learning.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- How working memory and reinforcement learning interact when avoiding punishment and pursuing reward concurrently.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and amygdala underlies avoidance learning during adolescence: Implications for developmental psychopathology.Development and psychopathology · 2025Article
- Human amygdala nuclei show distinct developmental trajectories from adolescence to adulthood in functional integration with prefrontal circuitry.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Dual process impairments in reinforcement learning and working memory systems underlie learning deficits in physiological anxiety.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
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- Social inequity disrupts reward-based learning.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Striatal dopamine can enhance both fast working memory, and slow reinforcement learning, while reducing implicit effort cost sensitivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- More than just a phase: adolescence as a window into how the brain generates behavior.Current directions in psychological science · 2025Article
- Genetic changes linked to two different syndromic forms of autism enhance reinforcement learning in early adolescent male but not female mice.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Reversal learning is influenced by cognitive flexibility and develops throughout early adolescence.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning increasingly relates to memory specificity from childhood to adulthood.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Computational Perspectives on Cognition in Anorexia Nervosa: A Systematic Review.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Review
- Social Contexts Requiring Adjudication Self- and Peer-Interest Differentially Alter Risk Preferences Across Adolescence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Electrical brain activations in preadolescents during a probabilistic reward-learning task reflect cognitive processes and behavior strategies.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Multiple neurocognitive systems contribute simultaneously to learning. For example, dopamine and basal ganglia (BG) systems are thought to support reinforcement learning (RL) by incrementally updating the value of choices, while the prefrontal cortex (PFC) contributes different computations, such as actively maintaining precise information in working memory (WM). It is commonly thought that WM and PFC show more protracted development than RL and BG systems, yet their contributions are rarely assessed in tandem. Here, we used a simple learning task to test how RL and WM contribute to changes in learning across adolescence. We tested 187 subjects ages 8 to 17 and 53 adults (25-30). Participants learned stimulus-action associations from feedback; the learning load was varied to be within or exceed WM capacity. Participants age 8-12 learned slower than participants age 13-17, and were more sensitive to load. We used computational modeling to estimate subjects' use of WM and RL processes. Surprisingly, we found more protracted changes in RL than WM during development. RL learning rate increased with age until age 18 and WM parameters showed more subtle, gender- and puberty-dependent changes early in adolescence. These results can inform education and intervention strategies based on the developmental science of learning.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.