Teens take longer than adults to make choices when the stakes are high, a new study by Weill Cornell researchers suggests. The study's findings contradict the perception that adolescent decision-making is always impulsive, and suggest that when rewards are involved, adolescents are quite capable of making informed decisions.
Lead investigator Theresa Teslovich, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, said the findings suggest that teens can be incentivized to slow down their decision making. For example, Teslovich said that reward systems could be used in schools to increase students' involvement.
"One example of incentivizing programs in school would be providing students the opportunity to earn points for cooperating in class or for exceptional school work, or even attendance, since it's a high predictor of better outcomes," Teslovich said. Points could be exchangeable currency for free time or other extracurricular activities, she said.
In the study, published online Sept. 16 in Developmental Science, adolescents and adults were asked to observe a cloud of randomly moving dots and determine the direction in which the dots were moving. Either a small or a large reward was paired with each correct answer.
Adults made their decisions more quickly when a large reward was associated with the correct answer. In contrast, teens were slower to make a decision when a large reward was at stake. That trend held even when the researchers controlled for differences in how well participants performed the task and for their perceptual abilities.
Teens' brains also showed heightened activity in fronto-parietal networks, regions of the brain associated with amassing evidence before making decisions. Taken together, the findings suggest that when large rewards are at stake, teens are willing to withhold a decision until they've accumulated sufficient evidence that their choice is the correct one.
Teslovich said she believes that teens are sensitive to "taking advantage of large rewards...If they were 'fast and loose' they would run the risk of making an error and not maximizing their gains."