Education Week - October 28, 2015 - 7

Long-Term Study to Track Adolescent Brain Development
Risk-taking, social factors
to be included in projects
By Sarah D. Sparks
Chicago

Every educator or parent who's wondered
what's going on in the heads of moody, socially obsessed teenagers may soon get an
answer. The National Institutes of Health
will dedicate $300 million over the next decade to launch the largest, most comprehensive study to date of how children's brains
develop during adolescence.
The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, or ABCD, will bring together researchers from nearly two dozen institutions
across the country to track the development of
10,000 children, ages 9 and 10, over the next
decade.
The project will be the largest longitudinal
study to use regular magnetic resonance imaging scans, or MRIs, to track how students'
brain structure and activity changes as they
grow, and compare those changes to measures of mental health, academic and social
progress and engagement, and risky behaviors, such as drug and alcohol use.
For the most part, studies of adolescents
have compared brain images of different
groups of children, teenagers, and adults to
identify changes over time, rather than following a representative group of students as
they grow.
"Until not too long ago, people thought
the development of the human brain was
essentially accomplished in the first few

years [of life]. However, it's become clearer
and clearer that the cognitive development
of the brain is very protracted," said Terry
L. Jernigan, a University of California, San
Diego, professor of cognitive science, psychiatry, and radiology and the director of the
university's Center for Human Development.
"We have the potential to gain a lot of critical insight into this time of the developing
mind."
Jernigan will lead the project's coordinating
center with UCSD psychology professor Sandra Brown.

Emerging Picture
Adolescence is a vulnerable transition
from childhood to adulthood. Teenagers are
the age group most likely to die from accidental injuries, like car crashes, and are
those at highest risk for the development of
serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia
and depression. And anyone who remembers
middle and high school knows that the bewildering mix of raging hormones and shifting social circles can play havoc on students'
academic development.
But emerging research suggests adolescence is also a critical time for the development of complex problem-solving and social
learning.
"We do recognize more and more that this
adolescent period does have some unique
characteristics in terms of how emotional
functions, motivation, and reward functions
are changing," Jernigan said. "They play a
large role in what kids are attracted to and
what they avoid and how well they negotiate
their entry into young adulthood."

For example, studies have found that
adolescents have higher activation in areas
of the brain associated with social connections, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal
cortex, than either children or adults. A
series of studies by University of California,
Los Angeles, neuroscientist Matthew
Lieberman found that teenagers assigned
to learn a gambling card game picked
up strategies more quickly and performed better when they played with three
others of the same age than they did
when they played the game only against a
computer.
"One of the things emerging from neuroscience has been our growing understanding of
what represents a rewarding experience for
adolescents and how our brains mediate reward or loss," Jernigan said. For adolescents
to be deeply engaged in a task, "people have
to be able to make progress, see that progress
as they are making it, and have some challenge and uncertainty to it. And that immediate feedback and progress is very engaging
to them."
The study will also provide more nuanced
insight into how drugs affect teenagers and
why prior studies have shown that people
who begin using drugs or alcohol during
adolescence are at greater risk of severe
addiction.
"Adolescents have access to high-potency
marijuana and greater varieties of nicotinedelivery devices than previous generations,"
said Nora Volkow, the director of the National
Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the NIH, in
a statement. "We want to know how that and
other trends affect the trajectory of the developing brain."

For example, some studies have found
teenagers use different patterns of thought
to perform a task involving self-control than
adults do, in ways that might make them
more vulnerable to the effects of addictive
drugs.
In one study presented at the Society for
Neuroscience meeting here last week, Georgia O'Callaghan, a researcher at Trinity College in Ireland, compared brain activity in
older adolescent and adult male drivers as
they took several tests of self-control and the
ability to gauge risk and rewards.

Risk-Taking and Self-Control
While both older and younger drivers performed equally accurately, O'Callaghan found
that young drivers had different patterns of
processing the self-control task than older
drivers, particularly if they had a history of
unsafe driving.
Researchers for 13 initial study sites met
last week at the Society for Neuroscience
meeting to plan the first five years of projects. They also plan to partner with schools
and districts to identify critical questions to
study.
"A set of experiences that seem to be
relatively devastating to one child can be
strengthening to another," Jernigan said.
"It's not likely we can define an optimal set
of experiences or curriculum for every child
to have," she said. "We have to learn better to
match the interventions we have available to
children when things go awry."
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Education Week - October 28, 2015

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