Exploring the Motivation and Learning Systems in the Adolescent Brain

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of neuroscience, developmental sciences and education. As children enter their teenage years and progress through middle school, they often show decreased motivation to learn. How to motivate these students and engage them in learning is a crucial but often-neglected problem facing educators. This problem is especially crucial as teens must increasingly learn to make their own decisions. Positive and negative feedback, such as praise and criticism, can serve as a powerful tool for educators, clinicians, and parents to promote learning; however, its effectiveness can be highly dependent upon how motivated the child is to learn. There are many changes in the teen brain to support learning during this crucial developmental period, including the maturation of different brain regions involved in motivation, reward processing, and self-control. These changes may make teens uniquely sensitive to positive and negative feedback during learning. Furthermore, these brain changes may also increase teens' sensitivity to motivating or demotivating aspects of their learning environment; for example, teens may be more sensitive than adults to whether a learning task is presented as a measure of their abilities versus an opportunity to practice new skills. The goal of this project is to bridge brain science, education, and psychology to uncover how interactions between the developing brain, the learning environment, and individual differences influence motivation and learning. Research in the burgeoning field of educational neuroscience has begun to investigate how learning new skills or information influences the brain; this project will take the reverse approach, by investigating how changes in the developing brain influence the ability to learn, both in the lab and in school. This project will advance the field of adolescent neurobiology and will illuminate opportunities to improve educational practice by tapping into the unique sensitivities of the developing teen brain. The findings will also pave the way for a new approach to educational neuroscience, in which neurobiological changes in the developing brain can help to inform pedagogical approaches. This project will bridge disparate literatures to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying adolescent learning, and will set the stage for future investigations of educational strategies to enhance adolescent learning. Because the striatum plays a critical role in reinforcement learning, its peaking sensitivity during adolescence may help to scaffold learning from performance-related feedback. Feedback is an important tool educators use to guide learning, so it is important to understand how ontogenetic changes in the adolescent brain influence the ability to learn from feedback. For this project, we will utilize complementary methodologies (fMRI and physiological measurements of skin conductance), and cutting-edge effective connectivity analyses (dynamic causal modeling) to understand how interactive networks contribute to learning across different developmental stages. Using these tools, in conjunction with contextual manipulations of motivation, measurement of individual achievement goals, and teacher reports of academic performance, the proposed study will aim to (1) characterize behavioral and neural responses to feedback during learning in early to mid-adolescence relative to adults, (2) investigate contextual effects on the motivational salience and learning efficacy of positive and negative feedback during adolescence, and (3) examine the link between neural responses during learning in the laboratory and educational outcomes in school. In this study, a sample of ethnically diverse teens and adults will undergo brain scans while performing a task that assesses their behavioral and neural responses to positive and negative feedback. The proposed research will address a gap in the literature by elucidating the role of the corticostriatal reward system in facilitating learning during this important developmental stage. Through this project, we will determine how the dynamics of the developing adolescent corticostriatal system mediate contextual motivational effects on feedback-based learning and help to illuminate the relevance of developmental neuroscience for academic achievement and educational practices outside of the laboratory.