How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods m...

The transition from adolescence to adulthood is a critical time for status attainment, with income, education, work experience, and independence from parents accruing at varying speeds and intensities. This study takes an intergenerational life-course perspective that incorporates parents' and one's own social status to examine the status attainment process from adolescence into adulthood in th...

The ability to voluntarily inhibit responses to task-irrelevant stimuli, which is a fundamental component of cognitive control, has a protracted development through adolescence. Previous human developmental imaging studies have found immaturities in localized brain activity in children and adolescents. However, little is known about how these regions integrate with age to form the distributed n...

BACKGROUND Human adolescence is a crucial stage of neurological development during which ethanol (EtOH) consumption is often at its highest. Alcohol abuse during adolescence may render individuals at heightened risk for subsequent alcohol abuse disorders, cognitive dysfunction, or other neurological impairments by irreversibly altering long-term brain function. To test this possibility, we mode...

Phoenix, Goy, Gerall, and Young first proposed in 1959 the organizational-activational hypothesis of hormone-driven sex differences in brain and behavior. The original hypothesis posited that exposure to steroid hormones early in development masculinizes and defeminizes neural circuits, programming behavioral responses to hormones in adulthood. This hypothesis has inspired a multitude of experi...

Background: Low cortisol levels are linked to a range of human behaviors and pathologies. However, it is not clear whether cortisol levels are a stable biological marker in adolescence. Therefore, in the current longitudinal study, the stability of having a low or high morning cortisol level during adolescence is studied in a delinquent and a general population sample. Methods: Adolescent boys ...

  Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and psychological human development that generally occurs during the period from puberty to legal adulthood. There are approximately 1.2 billion adolescents (10-19 years) globally, roughly 90% of whom live in low and middle-income countries. Most are healthy, but there is still significant death, illness and diseases among adolescents. Illnesses...

Cross-sectional studies have demonstrated that the cortical auditory evoked potential (CAEP) changes substantially in amplitude and latency from childhood to adulthood, suggesting that these aspects of the CAEP continue to mature through adolescence. However, no study to date has longitudinally followed maturation of these CAEP measures through this developmental period. Additionally, no study ...