Adriana Galvan: UCLA Department of Psychology

Adolescence is a developmental period marked by heightened sensitivity to reward and increased proclivity towards risk-taking behavior. These behavioral changes are paralleled by significant developmental changes in neural circuitry related to reward processing and cognitive control. In this talk, I will describe recent data on adolescent brain development, propose a neurobiological model to describe adolescent risk-taking behavior, and provide a framework for how these neuroimaging insights might be used for intervention and prevention of harmful risk-taking behaviors during adolescence.