has more independence, has a greater likelihood of having engaged in risky and reward-seeking behavior, and has a different appreciation of money (the most commonly used reward in these studies). As such, it is time for the field to set standards on how adolescents are classified; this is particularly crucial now that we have evidence that developmental changes follow a nonlinear pattern in many brain regions that peaks in mid-adolescence (Shaw et al., 2008). At the very least, investigators should make a more concerted effort to report how the age groups were defined. These definitions might include a particular age, puberty, or year in school (e.g., only high school students). While obtaining a broad age range is typically the ideal standard in developmental work to examine developmental change, this approach is only useful if the analyses are conducted in such a way as to appreciate the age and developmental continuum. That is, a broad age range that includes early-, middle- and late-adolescence is only developmentally informative if age is included as a regressor to examine individual variability across development. Instead, all studies described above group the “adolescent” sample and compare it to the comparison group, without taking advantage of the
