Adolescents have difficulty countering dysregulating influences and are susceptible to poor decision making in emotionally charged situations. This has important implications for adolescents who are arrested for crimes. Decisions made in legal settings (e.g., waiving rights to counsel; pleading guilty) entail very high stakes and are fraught with emotion.

Effective decision making relies, in part, on the ability to evaluate feedback and adapt behavior accordingly. The neural mechanisms underlying feedback processing involve midbrain dopamine neurons that project to regions of the frontal cortex that are not fully mature in adolescence. This study used an event related potential (ERP) design to investigate the relationship between this feedback processing system and executive function (EF) in adolescent and young adult males. An electrophysiological correlate of external feedback processing, the feedback-related negativity (FRN), was recorded while participants performed a simple gambling task. The FRN was then used as an index of the functional maturity of this system, and examined in relation to both age and performance on three independent measures of EF: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and a delay discounting task (DDT).

Despite having larger amplitudes in adolescents, the FRN was found to differentiate less strongly between gains and losses in adolescents compared to adults. For adolescents, but not for adults, poorer performance on the IGT was predicted by longer FRN latency after high loss trials on the ERP gambling task, and slower learning on the WCST was related to smaller FRN amplitudes after losses. These results suggest that the maturity of the “bottom-up” feedback signal might be more directly tied to observed behavior in teenagers than in adults. This study adds to the growing body of evidence that neural maturation in the frontal cortex may impact higher order decision making in adolescents, particularly if decision tasks involve affective components. Results are discussed in the context of their relevance for juvenile justice policy and the clinical evaluation and treatment of at-risk teens.