This is an exciting time in developmental neurobiology research of cognitive and motivational processes, with a surge in studies focused on the development of these processes in adolescence. Recent findings suggest that an enhanced sensitivity to motivational cues in adolescents, represented at the level of the striatum, modulates cognitive control-related processes differently from children or adults. As such, adolescent cognitive control capacity can be enhanced or impaired, depending on whether task demands require suppression of or attention to these motivational cues. More research is needed to understand the interplay between how subcortical and cortical regions interact to accomplish these dynamic cognitive control processes across development and how motivational cues may vary in salience across development (see Box 1).
