Grose-Fifer Jillian, Migliaccio Renee, Zottoli Tina M
Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, N.Y., USA.
Dev Neurosci. 2014;36(3-4):228-38. doi: 10.1159/000358917. Epub 2014 May 15.
Adolescence has frequently been characterized as a period of increased risk taking, which may be largely driven by maturational changes in neural areas that process incentives. To investigate age- and gender-related differences in reward processing, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from 80 participants in a gambling game, in which monetary wins and losses were either large or small. We measured two ERP components: the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the feedback P3 (fP3). The FRN was sensitive to the size of a win in both adult (aged 23-35 years) and adolescent (aged 13-17 years) males, but not in females. Small wins appeared to be less rewarding for males than for females, which may in part explain more approach-driven behavior in males in general. Furthermore, adolescent boys showed both delayed FRNs to high losses and less differentiation in FRN amplitude between wins and losses in comparison to girls. The fP3, which is thought to index the salience of the feedback at a more conscious level than the FRN, was also larger in boys than in girls. Taken together, these results imply that higher levels of risk taking that are commonly reported in adolescent males may be driven both by hypersensitivity to high rewards and insensitivity to punishment or losses.
青春期常常被描述为一个冒险行为增加的时期，这可能很大程度上是由处理奖励的神经区域的成熟变化所驱动的。为了研究奖励处理中与年龄和性别相关的差异，我们在一个赌博游戏中记录了80名参与者的事件相关电位（ERP），在该游戏中金钱的输赢有大有小。我们测量了两个ERP成分：反馈相关负波（FRN）和反馈P3（fP3）。FRN对成年男性（年龄在23 - 35岁之间）和青少年男性（年龄在13 - 17岁之间）的赢钱大小敏感，但对女性不敏感。小赢对男性似乎比对女性的奖励性更低，这可能部分解释了总体上男性更多的趋近驱动行为。此外，与女孩相比，青少年男孩对高损失的FRN延迟，并且在赢和输之间FRN振幅的差异更小。fP3被认为比FRN在更有意识的水平上指示反馈的显著性，在男孩中也比在女孩中更大。综上所述，这些结果表明，青少年男性中常见的较高水平的冒险行为可能是由对高奖励的超敏反应和对惩罚或损失的不敏感共同驱动的。
