Adolescent impatience decreases with increased frontostriatal connectivity

Compared with children and adults, teens and young adults often exhibit greater impulsivity and corresponding increases in emergency room visits, accidents from drug or alcohol use, and increased mortality risk. However, it remains poorly understood how increased impulsivity during adolescence may be explained in terms of brain and cognitive development. We focused on impatience, a central component of impulsiveness. We relate impatient behavior on a decision-making task to changes in connectivity within the brain’s frontostriatal circuitry. Our results suggest that relative future orientation, not sensitivity to immediate rewards, determines adolescent impatience. These findings may help to design interventions to prevent the detrimental effects of adolescent impulsiveness and serve as a template for understanding neurodevelopmental disorders.

Adolescence is a developmental period associated with an increase in impulsivity. Impulsivity is a multidimensional construct, and in this study we focus on one of the underlying components: impatience. Impatience can result from ( i ) disregard of future outcomes and/or ( ii ) oversensitivity to immediate rewards, but it is not known which of these evaluative processes underlie developmental changes. To distinguish between these two causes, we investigated developmental changes in the structural and functional connectivity of different frontostriatal tracts. We report that adolescents were more impatient on an intertemporal choice task and reported less future orientation, but not more present hedonism, than young adults. Developmental increases in structural connectivity strength in the right dorsolateral prefrontal tract were related to increased negative functional coupling with the striatum and an age-related decrease in discount rates. Our results suggest that mainly increased control, and the integration of future-oriented thought, drives the reduction in impatience across adolescence.