Previous work has shown that human adolescents may be hypersensitive to rewards, but it is not known which aspect of reward processing is responsible for this. We separated decision value and prediction error signals and found that neural prediction error signals in the striatum peaked in adolescence, whereas neural decision value signals varied depending on how value was modeled. This suggests that heightened dopaminergic prediction error responsivity contributes to adolescent reward seeking.

This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (5R24 MH072697), the National Institute of Drug Abuse (5F31 DA024534), the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Della Martin Foundation.

1. Jessica R Cohen & Russell A Poldrack

   Present address: Present address: University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA (J.R.C.), University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA (R.A.P.).,

Affiliations

1. Department of Psychology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

   Jessica R Cohen, Robert M Bilder, Susan Y Bookheimer, Barbara J Knowlton & Russell A Poldrack

2. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

   Robert F Asarnow, Fred W Sabb, Robert M Bilder, Susan Y Bookheimer & Russell A Poldrack

3. Brain Research Institute, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California, USA

   Fred W Sabb, Robert M Bilder, Susan Y Bookheimer, Barbara J Knowlton & Russell A Poldrack

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Contributions

J.R.C. helped design the experiments, conducted data acquisition and analyses, and wrote the manuscript. R.F.A., R.M.B. and S.Y.B. designed the experiments. F.W.S. contributed to data acquisition. B.J.K. and R.A.P. designed the experiments and helped write the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to

Jessica R Cohen

.

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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