Adolescent neurodevelopment of memory-guided decision making

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Daphna Shohamy at Columbia University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how adolescent brain development shapes memory and decision-making. This project will examine how adolescents access memories to make adaptive decisions, and how the development of key brain regions that guide learning and memory supports this ability. This research has direct implications for education policy and practice. Specifically, if adolescents exhibit age-related differences in memory-guided decision making due to ongoing brain development, this could have direct consequences for how individuals learn in and out of the classroom.

Adolescence is a period of the lifespan when ongoing brain development supports continuous gains in cognitive abilities, and adolescents must learn how to navigate the world with increasing independence. Prior work has shown that memory and decision-making systems continue to mature during adolescence, however, developmental studies have traditionally tested these cognitive processes in isolation. As a result, remarkably little is known about how the development of memory and the corresponding neural processes influence the emergence of adaptive decision-making during adolescence. Specifically, it remains unclear whether the maturation of memory and learning systems in the brain give rise to effective memory-guided decision-making. This research project aims to address this gap by leveraging recent advances from computational neuroscience that have identified how adults use memory to navigate decision-making. By combining this approach with tools from developmental cognitive neuroscience, this research investigates how these memory-guided decision processes emerge with age during adolescence. Across two experiments, this project integrates behavioral indices of learning and memory, computational modeling, and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to investigate the neurodevelopmental mechanisms of memory-guided decision-making. The first experiment tests the hypothesis that functional development of the hippocampus during adolescence shapes the ability to learn from a single experience. The second experiment tests the hypothesis that developing functional connectivity between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex supports the ability to integrate and generalize across multiple memories to guide adaptive decision-making. The current research aims to identify when and how memory guides adolescent decision-making. By examining the computational foundations and neurodevelopmental trajectories of memory-guided decision-making, the proposed research has the potential to reveal how learning and decision-making processes refine with age during adolescence.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.