As research begins to link changes in white matter (within prefrontal regions but, perhaps more important, in pathways linking prefrontal areas to other brain regions) to changes in adolescent behavior (a topic of study that has just now started receiving interest), we will gain further insight into the neural underpinnings of behavioral development in adolescence. For instance, work by Paus and his colleagues (Grosbras et al., 2007; Paus et al., 2008) has demonstrated that individual differences in individuals' vulnerability to peer pressure are correlated with differences in structural and functional connectivity in ways that link the development of resistance to peer influence to improvements in the coordination of emotion and cognition. This finding is also consistent with research showing that individual differences in structural connectivity during early adolescence are correlated with delay discounting performance, such that individuals with more highly organized white matter are less likely to be drawn to immediate rewards (Olson et al., 2008). It is worth nothing, however, that these findings are hard to reconcile with a recent report from Berns et al. (2009) indicating that structural
