Behavioral responses to, and the neural processing of, rewards change dramatically during adolescence and may contribute to observed increases in risk-taking during this developmental period. Functional MRI (fMRI) studies suggest differences between adolescents and adults in neural activation during reward processing, but findings are contradictory, and effects have been found in non-predicted directions. The current study uses an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach for quantitative meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies to: (1) confirm the network of brain regions involved in adolescents' reward processing, (2) identify regions involved in specific stages (anticipation, outcome) and valence (positive, negative) of reward processing, and (3) identify differences in activation likelihood between adolescent and adult reward-related brain activation. Results reveal a subcortical network of brain regions involved in adolescent reward processing similar to that found in adults with major hubs including the ventral and dorsal striatum, insula, and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Contrast analyses find that adolescents exhibit greater likelihood of activation in the insula while processing anticipation relative to outcome and greater likelihood of activation in the putamen and amygdala during outcome relative to anticipation. While processing positive compared to negative valence, adolescents show increased likelihood for activation in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and ventral striatum. Contrasting adolescent reward processing with the existing ALE of adult reward processing reveals increased likelihood for activation in limbic, frontolimbic, and striatal regions in adolescents compared with adults. Unlike adolescents, adults also activate executive control regions of the frontal and parietal lobes. These findings support hypothesized elevations in motivated activity during adolescence.
Pubmed ID: 26254587 RIS Download
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A community database of published functional and structural neuroimaging experiments with both metadata descriptions of experimental design and activation locations in the form of stereotactic coordinates (x,y,z) in Talairach or MNI space. BrainMap provides not only data for meta-analyses and data mining, but also distributes software and concepts for quantitative integration of neuroimaging data. The goal of BrainMap is to develop software and tools to share neuroimaging results and enable meta-analysis of studies of human brain function and structure in healthy and diseased subjects. It is a tool to rapidly retrieve and understand studies in specific research domains, such as language, memory, attention, reasoning, emotion, and perception, and to perform meta-analyses of like studies. Brainmap contains the following software: # Sleuth: database searches and Talairach coordinate plotting (this application requires a username and password) # GingerALE: performs meta-analyses via the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method; also converts coordinates between MNI and Talairach spaces using icbm2tal # Scribe: database entry of published functional neuroimaging papers with coordinate results
View all literature mentionsSoftware available from brainmap.org to perform meta-analyses via the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method. It also includes the transforms for icbm2tal conversions.
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