Bianca Westhoff

This study examines prosocial reinforcement learning in adolescents, finding increased ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity with age during learning for others.

The paper shows that cooperative social learning improves with age, while uncooperative learning remains stable, highlighting early adolescence as a critical period for social behavior development.

This study identifies three cognitive mechanisms—prior beliefs, prior uncertainty, and uncertainty tolerance—that drive age-related changes in belief updates about peer trustworthiness during adolescence.