natriuretic peptide receptor This view of ventral striatum s

This view of ventral striatum sensitivity as being adaptive and directing adolescents away from health-compromising behaviors has significant implications for the development of effective treatment and intervention efforts to prevent upward trajectories of depression, risk-taking behavior, and subsequent morbidity and mortality rates among adolescent populations. Although adolescents may tend to orient toward more maladaptive behaviors (Steinberg, 2005), identifying ways to take advantage of adolescents’ heightened ventral striatum sensitivity in ways that promote their health should be a key aim of ongoing research efforts. Teachers, parents, and clinicians should see it as a central goal to try to tip the balance in teens favor – that is, to direct their heightened ventral striatum sensitivity away from risk and toward opportunity. If we can find more ways to direct adolescents toward the positive aspects of their heightened ventral striatum reactivity, strengthening the pathways by which this system serves as an opportunity, and decreasing the availability or desire for the negative aspects of heightened ventral striatum reactivity, we may reduce mortality and morbidity rates in adolescence.
The complexity of ventral striatum reactivity in adolescence
Future directions
Conclusions
Introduction As a central form of executive function, working memory is required for the optimal performance of goal directed behaviors. Spatial working memory refers to the temporary maintenance of object location and the ability to manipulate this information (Logie, 1995). Neuroimaging studies have shown that the neural architecture of spatial working memory in young adults involves a group of frontal and parietal regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal natriuretic peptide receptor (DLPFC), frontal eye fields (FEF), pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), superior (SPL) and inferior parietal lobules (IPL) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) (Courtney et al., 1997; Leung et al., 2004). Similar frontal and parietal regions are found to be involved in spatial working memory in children and adolescents (Geier et al., 2009; Nelson et al., 2000; Thomas et al., 1999), though younger individuals (aged 9–12) appeared to show weaker neural responses to increased memory load compared to older individuals (aged 13–18) (Klingberg et al., 2002) and even weaker in comparison to adults (aged 20–29) (Thomason et al., 2009). This weaker load-related activation is thought to be related to lower working memory capacity and immature fronto-parietal function in youth (Giedd and Rapoport, 2010; Klingberg et al., 2002; Scherf et al., 2006). Several cross-sectional neuroimaging studies have examined the relationship between frontal and parietal activation and spatial working memory performance in youth, but yielded mixed findings. An earlier study showed that activations in the left superior frontal sulcus and left posterior parietal cortex (PPC) during spatial delayed recognition were associated with better working memory capacity, measured outside the scanner, in a group of 9–18 year olds (Klingberg et al., 2002). Greater activation in the left PPC was also associated with better performance on a spatial 1-back task during fMRI in a group of youth aged 12–17, with the inferior parietal areas further associated with better executive function measured outside of the scanner using the Trail Making Task (Nagel et al., 2005). However, the same study found a positive correlation between ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC) activation and working memory performance (measured by a backward digit span and an arithmetic task outside the scanner), while many other frontal areas including the medial superior frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior frontal gyri showed a negative correlation. In contrast, Olesen and colleagues (2007) found no significant correlation between spatial working memory performance and activation in the prefrontal or parietal areas in a group of 13 year olds, though a significant positive correlation between performance and parietal activation was found when adults (mean age 22.8) were included in the sample. These previous studies showed some evidence that better spatial working memory performance is associated with greater frontal and parietal activation in samples with a wider age range or in older individuals, though this may not extend to a narrower age range or younger individuals. Thus, the relationship between neuropsychological measures of working memory and executive function with frontal and parietal activation during working memory remains unclear.