In addition to showing greater positive responses to sucrose solutions in the taste reactivity paradigm, adolescent rats also have been found to exhibit reduced negative taste reactions relative to adults to an aversive solution, such as quinine (Wilmouth & Spear, 2009), a pattern of findings reminiscent of the enhanced rewarding, but attenuated aversive properties of drugs of abuse during adolescence described previously. Somewhat similar findings are emerging in recent imaging work where the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex has been reported to show greater recruitment to positive than negative feedback during the pre-/early adolescent period, with a gradual switch to greater recruitment by negative than positive feedback by late adolescence/early adulthood (van Duijvenvoorde et al., 2008). Crone and colleagues (2008) likewise have evidence of delayed development of adult-typical increases in activation to negative feedback across a variety of frontal brain regions during the adolescent period.
