Hazard anticipation of young novice drivers - SWOV

Figure 2.2. Model of the different developmental trajectories of the limbic system (e.g.
the nucleus accumbens) and the PFC that may be the underlying cause of the
tendency to take risk in adolescence (adapted from Casey et al., 2008).
The gap between the fast functional development of the bottom-up limbic
system and the slow development of the top-down control regions of the
PFC presumably peaks around 16 years of age, but it takes years after this
peak before the gap has completely disappeared (Steinberg, 2008). The slow
disappearance of the gap is supposed to be caused by the improving
functional connectivity between the limbic system and prefrontal regions
over time and the maturation the PFC (Casey et al., 2008).
After a review of the literature of studies applying fMRI about risk
taking of adolescents, Barbalat et al. (2010) postulated that risk-taking
behaviour of adolescents arises from three different decision-making biases:
risk aversion, loss aversion and intertemporal choice. Risk aversion means
that when people have to choose between two rewarding options, they will
usually prefer the more certain option even when the reward of that option is
possibly lower than that of the more risky option. Although adolescents in
general are also risk averse, they are less risk averse than adults. When
performing gambling tasks, adolescents showed less activation than adults in
the anterior insula (region of the brain involved in negative emotions such as
fear and disgust), the anterior cingulate gyrus (region of the brain involved
in assessing the salience of emotions and the processing of motivational
information) and the Orbito Frontal Cortex (OFC) / Ventromedial Prefrontal
Cortex (VMPFC) of the PFC (Bjork et al., 2007; Eshel et al., 2007). Persons
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