In this brief commentary, I focus on several broad themes that cut across the articles in this collection, both respect to what we know (or at least have a reasonably good understanding of) and with respect to what we don't know. As a non-neuroscientist with no formal training in the study of brain development, it is beyond my expertise to delve deeply into the technical details of the research described by the contributors to this anthology. Nor is such an analysis necessary; the papers are uniformly clear and written at a level that will both interest other neuroscientists and edify behavioral scientists like myself, who increasingly find themselves needing to know about the neural underpinnings of the psychological and social phenomena they study. My focus in this commentary will be mainly on what these new studies reveal that will be of special interest to those who study adolescent behavioral development.
