The current study also indicates topographic changes in ERO theta oscillations during reward processing in adolescent brain development (see Panels C1 and C2 of Figs 3 and 4) comparing adolescent to young adult subjects. Although both older and younger groups manifested anterior maxima of theta power for the loss condition and posterior maxima for the gain condition in line with our earlier study [49], the topography of theta activity in the current study showed increased anteriorization (and decreased posterior activity) during development from adolescence to young adulthood. Gasser et al. [184] studied topographic aspects of EEG development of normal children and adolescents from 6 to 17 years, and reported that the maturation of low frequencies (specifically, theta and alpha bands) started at posterior regions and terminated at anterior derivations with maturation. Further concurring with developmental ERO studies in the literature [52,58,185–188], our finding corroborated the phenomenon of a gradual shift towards anteriorized topography and greater frontal activation in theta activity (i.e., “frontalization”) [189,190], whereby the prefrontal cortex progressively matures and assumes greater control over neural processing from childhood through adolescence
