2011 Boston Meeting: Eveline Crone, Ph.D.
Adolescent Brain Development: A Window of Opportunities for Learning and Social Cognition
Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology, Eveline Crone, Ph.D. Department of Developmental Psychology, Leiden University
The 21st annual Award for Distinguished Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology was awarded to Dr. Eveline Crone, of Leiden University in the Netherlands. Crone, author of the popular Dutch book Het Puberende Brein (translated to English as The Adolescent Brain), received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Amsterdam, following which she completed a post-doc at U.C. Davis, under the direction of Dr. Silvia Bunge. She's been a faculty member at Leiden University since 2005, and was promoted to the rank of full professor in 2009. Her work, which she reviewed in an entertaining and animated talk, takes a developmental-cognitive-neuroscience perspective on processes related to cognitive control and self-regulation.
Crone opened her talk with reminiscences of her first visit to SPR, in 2002, where she was awarded a student poster award for her poster, Heart Rate and Skin Conductance Analysis of Iowa Gambling Performance . She then went on to review an ever-increasing body of work examining the enormous maturational changes occurring between childhood and adulthood in the busy adolescent brain. As Crone noted, adolescence is a universal human experience, but one that occurs on very different time-frames around the world. In her work, Crone has sought to explore the dramatic imbalance in the maturation of different brain regions from childhood to adulthood.
In studies looking at cognitive abilities like task-switching, working memory, reasoning, and error-processing, Crone and her colleagues find that, despite increases in risky behaviors, adolescence is not-as classically portrayed-only characterized by deficits in reasoning compared to adults (and even children). Instead, it's a period of rapid growth and development in which both increases and decreases in neural processing efficiency can be observed. As Crone emphasized in her talk, the period of adolescence might be better considered as a time of increased cognitive flexibility. Consistent with this, Crone and her colleagues have demonstrated greater activation in the striatum of adolescents compared to adults following gains in a gambling task (though you don't see this in children), as well as a differential pattern of PFC activation which seem to allow for greater flexibility in learning about rewards.
Likewise, because adolescence is a time when social networks shift from dependence on parents to the infinitely more complex and perilous world of peer relationships, shifts in neural representation of self and other in gambling tasks also occur during this time, as Crone detailed. In closing, Crone presented a video of an operatic representation of a domineering mother-set to the tune of the William Tell Overture-issuing confusing and conflicting demands under the cover of maternal love and concern; in other words, the world as seen through and adolescent's eyes.