Learning from Mistakes: A Longitudinal Neuroimaging-Cohort-Registry Study

Adolescence, the transition period between childhood and adulthood, is a time of dramatic developmental changes in body and behaviour, including changes in the brain and cognitive functions. A hallmark feature of this protracted human neurocognitive development is the development of self-regulation functions and underlying brain systems. As we mature, we change and improve how we monitor, process and adjust our own thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Individual differences in these functions and their development is believed to be important for learning and adaption, but also to be associated with the emergence of mental health problems. This project aims to produce new knowledge about self-regulation functions in the adolescent brain, with implications for mental health and education. We will 1) Accurately map the development of self-regulation and associated brain activity across adolescence, 2) Probe how this development is related to changes in brain structure and structural connectivity, 3) Test how early life influences and traits are associated with individual differences in adolescents’ self-regulation functions, and 4) Examine the relevance of these functions for mental health and school performance.

Adolescence, the transition period between childhood and adulthood, is a time of dramatic developmental changes in body and behaviour, including changes in the brain and cognitive functions. A hallmark feature of this protracted human neurocognitive development is the development of self-monitoring and -regulation functions, including error processing. Error-signals are central to many models of learning, within both psychology, neuroscience and informatics. At the brain level, specific electrophysiological signals are generated when a person makes an error. These signals have been found to strengthen across adolescence, a crucial time for rapid learning and adaptation to new environmental demands, but which also coincides with the onset of many mental disorders. We will conduct a unique project, combining a longitudinal multimodal neuroimaging study, a population cohort study, and a registry study, that will yield new knowledge about error processing in the adolescent brain, with implications for mental health and education. We will 1) Accurately map the development of error processing and associated brain activity across adolescence, 2) Probe how this development is related to changes in brain structure and structural connectivity, 3) Test the hypothesis that individual differences in adolescents’ error processing reflect stable psychological traits that can be traced back to early childhood temperament, and 4) Examine the relevance of error processing development for mental health and school performance. We will collect and analyse behavioural and electroencephalography (EEG) data, as well as registry data, from a large longitudinal sample of adolescents 12-18 years old. This will then be linked with data from the same participants from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study and the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort study (MoBa).