ArticleDevelopmental cognitive neuroscience2021
White-matter tract connecting anterior insula to nucleus accumbens predicts greater future motivation in adolescents.
Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 13 citations in OpenAlex.
- Weakening of Subcortical and Strengthening of Cortical Visual Pathways Across Early Adolescence.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Longitudinal development of the anterior insula-nucleus accumbens white matter pathway through adolescence predicts risk taking in young adulthood.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Human amygdala nuclei show distinct developmental trajectories from adolescence to adulthood in functional integration with prefrontal circuitry.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Complex Patterns of Altered White Matter Structural Connectivity within a 'subjective valuation network' in Treatment-Resistant Depression.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sex-Specific Vulnerability to Externalizing Problems: Sensitivity to Early Stress and Nucleus Accumbens Activation Over Adolescence.Biological psychiatry · 2025Article
- Nucleus Accumbens Resting State Functional Connectivity is Linked to Family Income, Reward Salience, and Substance Use.Journal of cellular neuroscience · 2025Article
- Early life stress moderates the relation between systemic inflammation and neural activation to reward in adolescents both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Striatal hypoactivation during monetary loss anticipation in individuals with substance use disorders in a heterogenous urban American Indian sample.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2023Article
- Posterior cingulate cortex targeted real-time fMRI neurofeedback recalibrates functional connectivity with the amygdala, posterior insula, and default-mode network in PTSD.Brain and behavior · 2023Article
- Anxiety in Parkinson's Disease Is Associated with Changes in Brain Structural Connectivity.Journal of Parkinson's disease · 2023Article
- Neural activations to loss anticipation mediates the association between difficulties in emotion regulation and screen media activities among early adolescent youth: A moderating role for depression.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The motivation to approach or avoid incentives can change during adolescence. Advances in neuroimaging allow researchers to characterize specific brain circuits that underlie these developmental changes. Whereas activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) can predict approach toward incentive gain, activity in anterior insula (AIns) is associated with avoidance of incentive loss. Recent research characterized the structural white-matter tract connecting the two brain regions, but the tract has neither been characterized in adolescence nor linked to functional activity during incentive anticipation. In this study, we collected diffusion MRI and characterized the tract connecting the AIns to the NAcc for the first time in early adolescents. We then measured NAcc functional activity during a monetary incentive delay task and found that structural coherence of the AIns-NAcc tract is correlated with decreased functional activity at the NAcc terminal of the tract during anticipation of no incentives. In adolescents who completed an assessment 2 years later, we found that AIns-NAcc tract coherence could predict greater future self-reported motivation, and that NAcc functional activity could statistically mediate this association. Together, the findings establish links from brain structure to function to future motivation and provide targets to study the reciprocal development of brain structure and function.
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