Changing contributions of emotion and reward information to learning through adolescence.

Incongruent emotion-reward cues impair early learning more in children than in adolescents and adults, with children showing persistent emotion bias in value estimates.

• Why it matters: Understanding how emotion and reward signals influence learning across development can clarify age-related differences in decision-making and inform educational or behavioral interventions.
• What they did: Researchers tested 8- to 22-year-olds using a reinforcement learning task with congruent and incongruent emotion and reward cues, analyzing choice behavior and value estimates through statistical and computational models.
• The result: Findings show that emotion-reward incongruence hampers early learning more in children, with the emotion bias decaying in adolescents and adults, while reward-based choice increases with age, indicating a developmental shift toward goal-relevant information dominance.