Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, New York, New York 10019, USA.
Psychophysiology. 2011 Sep;48(9):1184-91. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2011.01197.x. Epub 2011 Mar 30.
Teens often engage in risk taking. Avoiding risk may be aided by rapid access to cognitive models for danger. This study investigated whether these schemata are immature in adolescence. An N400 sentential priming paradigm compared risky, predictable, and incongruent sentence processing in adolescents and adults. Adults and teens processed predictable sentences similarly, as evidenced by equivalent N400 priming. However, in adults, more activation was required to access final words in a risky sentence than when the situation was predictable and benign. Conversely, teens showed little difference in N400s generated by risky or expected sentences. This suggests that risky scenario final words were unexpected for adults but not for adolescents because of age-related differences in world knowledge and risk-related schemata. This study may help to explain why teenagers engage in risky activities when there is little time for deliberative thought.
青少年经常冒险。快速获取危险的认知模型可能有助于避免风险。本研究调查了这些图式在青春期是否不成熟。通过 N400 句子启动范式比较了青少年和成年人对风险、可预测和不一致句子的处理。成年人和青少年对可预测的句子的处理方式相似，这可以从等效的 N400 启动中得到证明。然而，在成年人中，处理风险句子的最后一个词需要更多的激活，而当情况可预测且良性时则不需要。相反，青少年在风险或预期句子产生的 N400 中差异不大。这表明，对于成年人来说，风险情景的最后一个词是出乎意料的，但对于青少年来说并非如此，因为他们在世界知识和风险相关图式方面存在年龄差异。这项研究可能有助于解释为什么青少年在没有时间深思熟虑的情况下从事冒险活动。
