ArticlePLoS computational biology2021
Modeling changes in probabilistic reinforcement learning during adolescence.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 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
- Synaptic pruning, myelination and the emergence of psychiatric disorders in late adolescence.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Apparent learning biases emerge from optimal inference: Insights from master equation analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- Sex differences in visually guided orienting behavior emerges during adolescence in mice.iScience · 2025Article
- Navigating a varying reward environment in childhood and adolescence.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Stochastic decisions support optimal foraging of volatile environments, and are disrupted by anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reversal learning is influenced by cognitive flexibility and develops throughout early adolescence.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- What's in a name: The role of verbalization in reinforcement learning.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- Decrease in decision noise from adolescence into adulthood mediates an increase in more sophisticated choice behaviors and performance gain.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Revisiting adolescence as a sensitive period for sociocultural processing.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2024Review
- Goal-directed learning in adolescence: neurocognitive development and contextual influences.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2024Review
- Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Action initiation and punishment learning differ from childhood to adolescence while reward learning remains stable.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Expecting the unexpected: a review of learning under uncertainty across development.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2023Review
- Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Article
- Reinforcement learning and Bayesian inference provide complementary models for the unique advantage of adolescents in stochastic reversal.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Pruning recurrent neural networks replicates adolescent changes in working memory and reinforcement learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the real world, many relationships between events are uncertain and probabilistic. Uncertainty is also likely to be a more common feature of daily experience for youth because they have less experience to draw from than adults. Some studies suggest probabilistic learning may be inefficient in youths compared to adults, while others suggest it may be more efficient in youths in mid adolescence. Here we used a probabilistic reinforcement learning task to test how youth age 8-17 (N = 187) and adults age 18-30 (N = 110) learn about stable probabilistic contingencies. Performance increased with age through early-twenties, then stabilized. Using hierarchical Bayesian methods to fit computational reinforcement learning models, we show that all participants' performance was better explained by models in which negative outcomes had minimal to no impact on learning. The performance increase over age was driven by 1) an increase in learning rate (i.e. decrease in integration time scale); 2) a decrease in noisy/exploratory choices. In mid-adolescence age 13-15, salivary testosterone and learning rate were positively related. We discuss our findings in the context of other studies and hypotheses about adolescent brain development.
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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.