The effect of obstructed action efficacy on reward-based decision-making in healthy adolescents: a novel functional MRI task to assay frustration

Frustration is common in adolescence and often interferes with executive functioning, particularly reward-based decision-making, and yet very little is known about how incidental frustrating events (independent of task-based feedback) disrupt the neural circuitry of reward processing in this important age group. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 45 healthy adolescents played a card game in which they had to guess between two options to earn points, in low- and high-stake conditions. Functioning of button presses through which they made decisions was intermittently blocked, thereby increasing frustration potential. Neural deactivation of the precuneus, a Default Mode Network region, was observed during obstructed action blocks across stake conditions, but less so on high- relative to low-stake trials. Moreover, less deactivation in goal-directed reward processing regions (i.e., caudate), frontoparietal “task control” regions, and interoceptive processing regions (i.e., somatosensory cortex, thalamus) were observed on high-stake relative to low-stake trials. These findings are consistent with less disruption of goal-directed reward seeking during blocked action efficacy in high-stake conditions among healthy adolescents. These results provide a roadmap of neural systems critical to the processing of frustrating events during reward-based decision-making in youths and could help to characterize how frustration regulation is altered in a range of pediatric psychopathologies.