As a group, adolescents are far more likely to engage in risky or reckless behaviors than children or adults. This proclivity towards risk has important ramifications for their health and well-being, as morbidity and mortality rates rise sharply (nearly 200%) during adolescence due in large measure to the negative consequences of sub-optimal, risky choices. A developmental ‘mismatch’ between heightened sensitivity to rewards and still-maturing inhibitory control brain systems has been hypothesized to underlie suboptimal decision-making and risk taking during adolescence, yet relatively few studies have explicitly examined the interaction of these core systems. In this talk I first highlight results from a series of fast, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging studies aimed at characterizing the neural circuitry supporting performance on a rewarded antisaccade (inhibitory) task in healthy adolescents and young adults. The rewarded AS enables efficient, concurrent assessment of brain systems mediating two key brain processes underlying decision-making. Collectively, these studies point to a differential activation profile in these systems in adolescents relative to adults. In the second part of the talk I discuss recent work aimed at understanding how reward and inhibitory control-related systems are activated in adult daily smokers compared to non-smokers. I conclude by discussing a new project centered on examining these systems in adolescent smokers.
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