To further support an association between adolescents' risky behavior and sensitivity to reward as indexed by an exaggerated ventral striatal response, Van Leijenhorst and colleagues 18 tested this association using a gambling task. The task included Low-Risk gambles with a high probability of obtaining a small monetary reward and High-Risk gambles with a smaller probability of obtaining a larger monetary reward. The fMRI results confirmed that High-Risk choices were associated with ventral striatal recruitment whereas Low-Risk choices were associated with activation in ventral medial prefrontal cortex. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that risky behavior in adolescence is associated with an imbalance caused by different developmental trajectories of subcortical reward and prefrontal regulatory brain regions consistent with our neurobiological model of adolescence.
