Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionAdolescent Development of Value-Guided Goal Pursuit
Section snippets
Letting Value be your Guide
As individuals transition from childhood to adulthood, dramatic changes occur on physical, psychological, and neurobiological levels to impact how individuals orchestrate their actions in a given moment. During adolescence (see Glossary), individuals begin to navigate increasingly complex daily challenges with more autonomy than ever before. However, all challenges are not created equal: some have more consequential outcomes than others, based on the goal at hand and the value of what is at
Value Assignment across Development
A crucial building block to value-guided goal pursuit is the ability to detect and assign value to cues in the environment. The value attributed to a given action signifies the benefits that are expected to follow from it [5]. Being attuned to value in the environment allows an individual to evaluate the potential positive and negative outcomes of their actions. Although value cannot be measured directly, higher value can be inferred from indirect assessments: higher subjective ratings of
Value-Guided Cognitive Control
Cognitive control represents a collection of mental processes that allow individuals to select contextually appropriate behavior to pursue superordinate goals [24]. Recent work in adults has focused on how the value of a goal influences the execution of cognitive control 25, 26. Converging evidence demonstrates that when high-value goals are at stake, adults selectively improve their goal-directed actions (e.g., 10, 27, 28). For example, young adults are more likely to improve control
Cognitive Control Development
The maturation of cognitive control follows a protracted developmental trajectory, improving from childhood through adolescence 39, 40, 41. It is important to recognize that adolescents can successfully exert cognitive control and, in many situations, they achieve adult-like levels of performance 42, 43. However, continued gains in cognitive control through adolescence are nonetheless observed when measuring the speed and consistency of performance, and when challenging the system with
The Development of Value-Guided Cognitive Control
In this section, we propose that when faced with increasing cognitive control demands, the beneficial effects of value on cognitive performance continues to emerge throughout adolescence. Here, we highlight a set of studies supporting this perspective. One study testing children, adolescents, and young adults examined the influence of value on selective attention [51]. Participants completed a visual search task that invoked context monitoring (e.g., [52]). The task consisted of trials that
Development of Value-Guided Control: Constraints and Hypotheses
These recent studies suggest that value-guided control improvements continue to emerge throughout adolescence. Here, we turn to evidence from studies of adults to interpret this developmental trajectory. While work on adults has demonstrated the helpful effects of value on cognitive control, there is evidence that the beneficial effects of value diminish when a cognitive demand exceeds an individual’s capacity [54]. Further, the beneficial effects of value disappear when participants are taxed
The Development of Value-Guided Learning
Whether in school, vocational settings, or social environments, individuals of all ages face the need to prioritize learning of certain information to maximize pursuit of goals in the moment and in the future. Using value to guide what and when to learn is thus a second core process underpinning mature goal-directed behavior. Experimentally, learning to associate stimuli or actions with valued outcomes is inferred when a participant chooses the highest-value stimuli or actions based on feedback
Development of Value-Guided Learning: Constraints and Hypotheses
When does value help or hinder learning over development? Research on the development of reinforcement learning is still generating and testing predictive models to answer this question. Here, we highlight considerations for future work in this area.
Computational learning models afford the opportunity to reveal the underlying component cognitive processes (e.g., learning rate, expected value) that contribute to learning within an individual. Importantly, model parameters can differ even when
Concluding Remarks
As a product of their emerging independence, adolescents are challenged by the need to make increasingly complex decisions of how to act and what to learn. Here we present a framework that explains the age-related expansion in the range of cognitive challenges for which value improves performance. This account draws a key distinction between detecting value in the environment, a process which even young children are capable of, and using that information to guide the orchestration of
Acknowledgements
We thank the members of the Affective Neuroscience and Development Laboratory for helpful discussion. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER award (BCS-1452530) to L.H.S.
Glossary
- Adolescence
- phase of the lifespan beginning with the onset of physical puberty and ending with the assumption of adult roles.
- Computational model
- a mathematical formalization of the interactions among assumed underlying cognitive processes required to perform a task, which allows for estimating contributions of component processes in complex cognition.
- Context monitoring
- a cognitive control process that involves selectively attending to the environment for relevant cues to determine the contextually
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