In the present study, we investigated developmental differences in responding to reward versus non-reward feedback during a non-learning feedback task. We compared three age groups of children and adolescents: 10–12-year-olds, 13–14-year-olds, and 15–17-year-olds. We examined the ERP correlates of external feedback processing (FRN), relying on a four-choice reward-based decision-making task similar to our previous work (Crowley, Wu, Crutcher, et al., 2009), but replacing a loss condition with a non-reward condition. That is, among four balloons, some contained a reward while others were empty (non-reward). As with a number of previous studies, we observed that the FRN was larger for non-rewarded feedback compared to rewarded feedback. We also observed the FRN for non-reward had a significantly shorter latency than for the reward condition, with non-reward yielding a 13.29 msec faster peak latency than reward. Source modeling indicated condition specific differences related to reward versus non-reward in BA 25 (subgenual ACC), BA 24 (ventral ACC), and BA 11 (orbitofrontal cortex), with the subgenual ACC emerging as the strongest regional effect and also the region differentiating males and females, but not age groups. Differences in Brodmann areas 32 (dorsal ACC) and BA 10 (orbitofrontal cortex) did not reach significance.
