br Conclusions br Acknowledgements br Introduction Over the

Conclusions
Acknowledgements
Introduction Over the past few years the neural architecture of how cognitive control is supported when having to process emotional information has slowly begun to be uncovered (e.g., Cromheeke and Mueller, 2014; Dolcos and McCarthy, 2006; Kanske and Kotz, 2011; Pessoa, 2008). However, work in adults assumes a fully developed neural system. By contrast, neurobiological models of adolescent pkm2 development postulate an imbalance between early maturation of structures involved in reward (i.e., dorsal and ventral striatum) and threat (i.e., amygdala) processing on the one hand, and delayed maturation of top-down control and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on the other hand (Ernst et al., 2006; Shulman et al., 2016). Therefore, because of this neurobiological imbalance prioritizing affective processing, one would hypothesize a stronger influence of affective material on top-down cognitive control in adolescents relative to adults. At the theoretical level, one of these models, the triadic model (Ernst, 2014; Ernst et al., 2006), assumes a triangular relationship, in which an immature PFC in adolescents fails to regulate (through cognitive control) an overactive approach-motivated system (manifested in increased sensitivity to positive material and nucleus accumbens activity) and a reduced avoidance-related system (manifested in decreased sensitivity to negative material and reduced amygdala activity). Empirical support for this view has slowly been increasing and shows, for example, that the larger emotionality during adolescence may be due to decreased ability for top-down regulation of negative responses (Silvers et al., 2015) or appetitive cues (Somerville et al., 2011) and generally heightened reward sensitivity during adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood (Ernst et al., 2005; Galvan et al., 2006; Silverman et al., 2015). Other studies have specifically examined the influence of emotional stimuli on cognitive control functions including inhibitory control (Hare et al., 2008) or working memory (Ladouceur et al., 2013). However, these studies have differed on whether emotional valence was relevant (Hare et al., 2008) or irrelevant (Ladouceur et al., 2013) to the task at hand. Yet, task relevance could be of particular importance to neurobiological models of development as determining whether an affective stimulus is relevant or not may require differential biasing of the triadic relationship between top-down control and reward- and avoidance-related behavior. As already noted above, the reward- and avoidance-related neural systems are already relatively more developed in adolescents and thus show heightened sensitivity to affective information (Ernst et al., 2005; Galvan et al., 2006; Silverman et al., 2015). When a positive or negative stimulus is processed that is task-relevant, it quickly engages the underlying reward-related or avoidance-related neural systems, respectively, and receives preferential processing. By contrast, when the presented affective information is task-irrelevant, the heightened activation of these limbic areas may need to be suppressed by a dlPFC in adolescents that cannot yet fully counteract such distraction. Whereas the dlPFC counteracts such distracting information in adults (Cromheeke and Mueller, 2014), cognitive and affective interference regulation is stronger in young adults relative to late adolescents in the PFC (Veroude et al., 2013) testifying to its late development. Therefore, one might hypothesize that affective material, when task-relevant, would be preferentially processed in adolescents relative to adults. On the other hand, an immature PFC in adolescents will result in less ability to moderate the impact of irrelevant emotional information. Yet, direct investigations to probe such a hypothesis across developmental periods are currently lacking. A previous behavioral study (Cromheeke and Mueller, 2016) that supports these conjectures tested participants on two attentional conditions with happy, angry, and neutral face stimuli within the context of an emotional working memory task. In the emotional task ‘irrelevant’ condition, participants were asked to neglect the affective information and focus on the gender of the face while in the emotional task ‘relevant’ condition they were asked to remember the valence of the face. The results indicated that relevant happy faces speeded reaction times (RTs) relative to neutral or angry faces in both age groups. Importantly, though, this effect was larger for adolescents than adults and also indicated a slowing in adolescents if happy faces were task-irrelevant. These behavioral findings lend support to the idea that task-relevance of emotion may play a role in whether affective stimuli positively or negatively affect performance in adolescents.