Citation

Kiat J, Straley B, Cheadle JE. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 2015; 11(3): 377-386.

Affiliation

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 737 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0324, 402-472-6037, j.e.cheadle@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/scan/nsv121

PMID

26416785

Abstract

Young people frequently socialize together in contexts that encourage risky decision making, pointing to a need for research into how susceptibility to peer influence is related to individual differences in the neural processing of decisions during sequentially escalating risk. We applied a novel analytic approach to analyze EEG activity from college-going students while they completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), a well-established risk-taking propensity assessment. By modeling outcome-processing-related changes in the P200 and feedback-related negativity (FRN) sequentially within each BART trial as a function of pump order as an index of increasing risk, our results suggest that analyzing the BART in a progressive fashion may provide valuable new insights into the temporal neurophysiological dynamics of risk taking. Our results showed a P200, localized to the left caudate nucleus, and an FRN, localized to the left dACC, that were positively correlated with the level of risk taking and reward. Furthermore, consistent with our hypotheses, the rate of change in the FRN was higher among college students with greater self-reported resistance to peer influence (RPI).

Language: en