Incentive Motivation, Cognitive Control, and the Adolescent Brain: Is It Time for a Paradigm Shift?

It can be argued that adolescents decision making is biased more by motivational factors than by cognitively driven calculations of outcome probabilities. Brain-based models, derived from structural and functional neuroimaging perspectives to account for this bias, have focused on purported differences in rates of development of motivational and regulatory-control systems. This article proposes a neurochemically based framework for understanding adolescents behavioral biases and suggests that there should be an increased focus on the dopaminergic substrates of incentive motivation, which increases into adolescence and decreases thereafter. The article also discusses the manner in which this increase interacts with executive control systems in affecting self-regulation.