Behavioral and neural correlates of loss aversion and risk avoidance in adolescents and adults

Abstract

Individuals are frequently faced with risky decisions involving the potential for both gain and loss. Exploring the role of both potential gains and potential losses in predicting risk taking is critical to understanding how adolescents and adults make the choice to engage in or avoid a real-life risk. This study aimed to examine the impact of potential losses as well as gains on adolescent decisions during risky choice in a laboratory task. Adolescent (n=18) and adult (n=16) participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a mixed gambles task, and completed questionnaires measuring real-world risk-taking behaviors. While potential loss had a significantly greater effect on choice than potential gain in both adolescents and adults and there were no behavioral group differences on the task, adolescents recruited significantly more frontostriatal circuitry than adults when choosing to reject a gamble. During risk-seeking behavior, adolescent activation in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was negatively correlated with self-reported likelihood of risk taking. During risk-avoidant behavior, mPFC activation of in adults was negatively correlated with self-reported benefits of risk-taking. Taken together, these findings reflect different neural patterns during risk-taking and risk-avoidant behaviors in adolescents and adults.

Fig. 1

Example of a trial from the mixed gambles task. Participants had 3000ms in which to respond to the gamble by pressing one of four keys. A jittered inter-stimulus interval followed, after which participants viewed and responded to a new gamble. Participants did not experience the outcomes of the gambles during the scan.

Fig. 2

The effects of increasing gain amounts and loss amounts on response choice for adolescents and adults. For both age groups, increasing gain amounts increased the likelihood of accepting a gamble (A) while increasing loss amounts decreased the likelihood of accepting a gamble (B). The magnitude of the slope for losses was significantly greater than that for gains.

Fig. 3

The contrast Rejected Trials>Baseline for Adolescents>Adults. (A) Greater activation is observed in adolescents than adults in the frontal pole, p<.001, cluster size=1080 voxels. (B) The difference in percent signal change between the two age groups is shown for 6-mm spherical ROI centered on the local maximum peak voxel in the frontal pole (B; x=30, y=50, and z=38). (C) Greater activation is observed in adolescents than adults in the caudate, p<.02, cluster size=486 voxels. (D) The difference in percent signal change between the two age groups is shown for 6-mm spherical ROI centered on the local maximum peak voxel in the caudate (D; x=−16, y=18, and z=18). All activation is cluster corrected for multiple comparisons.

Fig. 4

(A) Peak voxel neural activation in MPFC (cluster size=436 voxels, p<.03) and precentral gyrus (cluster size=704 voxels, p<.01) in the Rejected Trials>Baseline contrast correlated negatively with self-reported benefits of risk-taking (measured on a Likert scale from 1 to 7) in adults (left) but not in adolescents (right). (B) Peak voxel neural activation in MPFC (cluster size=559 voxels, p<.001) in the Accepted Trials>Baseline contrast correlated negatively with self-reported likelihood of risk-taking (measured on a Likert scale from 1 to 7) in adolescents (left) but not in adults (right).