have difficulty favoring the advantageous risk-avoiding strategy, suggesting that deficiencies in integrating emotional information can lead to poor decisions (Bechara et al., 1999; Bechara et al., 1996). Adolescents and adults may differ in the way they integrate emotional information in decisions: adolescents may be less adept at interpreting or integrating relevant emotional content, or less effective at forming such associations. Cauffman et al. (2010) recently tested children, adolescents, and adults on a modified version of the Iowa Gambling Task; they observed that while both adolescents and adults improved their decision-making over time, adults did this more rapidly. Another study demonstrated that only by mid- to late- adolescence did subjects improve their gambling task performance, and that this improvement coincided with the appearance of physiological correlates of arousal (Crone and van der Molen, 2007). These results suggest that adolescents may be less effective at forming or interpreting the sort of relevant affective information necessary to avoid risky decisions.
