A scientific area that has received less attention is determining how cognitive control and motivational systems interact over the course of development. Very recent work has suggested that adolescents possess an enhanced ability to flexibly upregulate cognitive performance if an incentive is at stake. Work by Ernst and colleagues[42,43] used an antisaccade task to measure cognitive control behavior and promised a financial reward for accurate performance on some trials but not others. Results showed that promise of a reward facilitated adolescent cognitive control behavior more than for adults, a finding that has recently been extended to social rewards (e.g, happy faces) as well[44].
