Striatal Prediction Error Tracking Moderates the Influence of Social Exposure on Adolescent Substance Use Curiosity.

Overview

1. Department of Psychology, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
2. Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
3. Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

Abstract

Adolescence is a period of social development marked by increased sensitivity to social feedback and substance use experimentation. Although reinforcement learning (RL) models provide a powerful framework for examining how individuals learn from experience, they have rarely been applied to understand how adolescents learn from social experiences or how these processes relate to real‐world behavioral outcomes. In a sample of 261 youth (11.0 ± 1.6 years old), we applied computational modeling to a novel social RL fMRI paradigm. Q‐learning models estimated individual differences in learning and trial‐by‐trial prediction errors, which were used as a parametric modulator to assess brain activity that tracked the degree to which social feedback was better or worse than expected. Among older participants (n = 73; 12.9 ± 0.9 years old), we assessed associations between RL metrics and measures of substance use propensity. Greater substance use curiosity and household exposure to substance use were both linked to weaker striatal prediction error tracking of better‐than‐expected outcomes. However, among youth with substance‐using peers, curiosity was associated with elevated striatal prediction error signals and better positive RL performance. Findings suggest that both hypo‐ and hyper‐sensitivity to positive reinforcement learning signals may confer an increased propensity for substance use, possibly through distinct pathways.

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Data

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Data Availability Statement

The authors have released code and tabular data associated with this manuscript on GitHub (https://github.com/Flanneryg3/FF_ProjectCode), and unthresholded brain maps are available on NeuroVault (https://neurovault.org/collections/21902/).

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY-NC), from the paper cited above.

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Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, issue, pages, dates, 5 authors, 7 keywords, 12 MeSH terms, 2 funders, 88 references.

Cite

This paper

Flannery, J. S., Escalante, E. S., Ma, R., Lindquist, K. A., & Telzer, E. H. (2026). Striatal Prediction Error Tracking Moderates the Influence of Social Exposure on Adolescent Substance Use Curiosity. Human brain mapping, 47(8), e70545. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.70545

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