Learning together: behavioral, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying social learning in adolescence

The overarching goal of this thesis was to examine the behavioral, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying social learning in adolescence. The first aim was to examine developmental patterns across adolescence of two forms of social learning: (1) learning about other people, specifically, whether they are (un)cooperative and (un)trustworthy, and (2) learning for other people (prosocial learning) to know what actions may benefit or help others. I made use of multiple experimental paradigms based on well-known economic games and/or probabilistic reinforcement learning paradigms to assess these forms of social learning. Secondly, I aimed to examine underlying mechanisms and factors that account for age-related and individual differences in social learning. Applying computational modeling and functional neuroimaging as additional tools contributed to a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and how these develop across adolescence. The findings in this thesis converge to early-to-mid adolescence as a key developmental period for developing well-adjusted social behaviors, and especially in the cooperative domain there are pronounced improvements. These studies make an important contribution to the literature on social development and learning, and may eventually contribute to interventions targeted at promoting well-adjusted behavior in typically developing adolescents, as well as youth with maladaptive social tendencies. The research described in this thesis was supported by an Open Research Area (ORA) grant (464-15-176) from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded to dr. Anna C.K. van DuijvenvoordePathways through Adolescenc