Audience effects on the neural correlates of relational reasoning in adolescence.

Adolescents are particularly sensitive to peer influence. This may partly be due to an increased salience of peers during adolescence. We investigated the effect of being observed by a peer on a cognitively challenging task, relational reasoning, which requires the evaluation and integration of multiple mental representations. Relational reasoning tasks engage a fronto-parietal network including the inferior parietal cortex, pre-supplementary motor area, dorsolateral and rostrolateral prefrontal cortices. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), peer audience effects on activation in this fronto-parietal network were compared in a group of 19 female mid-adolescents (aged 14-16 years) and 14 female adults (aged 23-28 years). Adolescent and adult relational reasoning accuracy was influenced by a peer audience as a function of task difficulty: the presence of a peer audience led to decreased accuracy in the complex, relational integration condition in both groups of participants. The fMRI results demonstrated that a peer audience differentially modulated activation in regions of the fronto-parietal network in adolescents and adults. Activation was increased in adolescents in the presence of a peer audience, while this was not the case in adults.

The audience effect in adolescence depends on who's looking over your shoulder.

Adolescents have been shown to be particularly sensitive to peer influence. However, the data supporting these findings have been mostly limited to the impact of peers on risk-taking behaviours. Here, we investigated the influence of peers on performance of a high-level cognitive task (relational reasoning) during adolescence. We further assessed whether this effect on performance was dependent on the identity of the audience, either a friend (peer) or the experimenter (non-peer). We tested 24 younger adolescent (10.6-14.2 years), 20 older adolescent (14.9-17.8 years) and 20 adult (21.8-34.9 years) female participants. The presence of an audience affected adolescent, but not adult, relational reasoning performance. This audience effect on adolescent performance was influenced by the participants' age, task difficulty and the identity of the audience. These findings may have implications for education, where adolescents often do classwork or homework in the presence of others.

Developmental changes in effects of risk and valence on adolescent decision-making.

Recent research on risky decision-making in adults has shown that both the risk in potential outcomes and their valence (i.e., whether those outcomes involve gains or losses) exert dissociable influences on decisions. We hypothesised that the influences of these two crucial decision variables (risk and valence) on decision-making would vary developmentally during adolescence. We adapted a risk-taking paradigm that provides precise metrics for the impacts of risk and valence. Decision-making in 11-16 year old female adolescents was influenced by both risk and valence. However, their influences assumed different developmental patterns: the impact of valence diminished with age, while there was no developmental change in the impact of risk. These different developmental patterns provide further evidence that risk and valence are fundamentally dissociable constructs and have different influences on decisions across adolescence.