In sum, while there is no doubt that the reward system undergoes dramatic developmental changes during adolescence, the precise features of these maturational events cannot easily be determined and will require further exploration, in both the animal and human literatures. By rooting research on the dopamine system in animal findings, we can begin to constrain interpretations of data from the human work, to better understand what precisely is changing in the striatal dopamine system that predisposes adolescents to engage in high reward-seeking behaviors.
