excitation and inhibition and the coordination of neuronal groups. As fast-spiking interneuron activity is critical to controlling the precise timing of neural activity and the entrainment of oscillations, the developmental shifts in adolescent interneuron activity and their response to neuromodulators like dopamine may be central to some of these age-related processing differences. As a result of this, adolescent neural activity may be less well-coordinated, noisier, and more local, and also perhaps more sensitive to the behaviorally activating effects of rewards, novelty, or other salient stimuli. Reduced inter-regional oscillatory coordination, further hampered by incomplete myelination, could together account for the less-distributed functional activity observed in imaging studies. The previously mentioned tendency for adolescents to favor risky choices in emotionally charged contexts could also be related to a combination of reduced inter-regional communication (e.g. failure of the prefrontal cortex to effectively dampen subcortical “go” signals in the basal ganglia), and exaggerated activation and/or reduced inhibition to salient cues in the context of motivated behavior, as we observed during reward anticipation in the orbitofrontal cortex.
