While the previous examples provide instances of enhanced performance in teens with incentives, rewards can also diminish performance when suppressing responses to rewards that lead to high gain. For example, using a gambling task in which reward feedback was provided immediately during decision-making (“hot” trials which heightened task-elicited affective arousal) or withheld until after the decision (“cold” deliberate decision making trials), Figner and colleagues 37 showed that adolescents made disproportionately more risky gambles compared to adults but only in the “hot” condition. Using a similar task, the Iowa Gambling Task, Cauffman and colleagues 38 have shown that this sensitivity to rewards and incentives actually peaks during adolescence, with a steady increase from late childhood to adolescence in tendency to play with more advantageous decks of cards and then a subsequent decline from late adolescence to adulthood. These findings illustrate a curvilinear function, peaking roughly between 13 and 17, and then declining 27. While prior findings with the Iowa Gambling task have shown a linear increase in performance with age 39, these studies did not look at age continuously nor did they examine only trials with advantageous decks of cards.
