The Promise and Challenges of Intensive Repeated Measures for Cognitive Neuroscience Models of Adolescent Substance Use

Abstract

Developmental cognitive neuroscience models attribute the increasing engagement insubstance use during adolescence to within-person changes in the functional balancebetween the neural systems underlying incentive processing and cognitive control. Inreviewing existing evidence for these models, we find that the evidence is suggestive,with adolescents high in sensation-seeking and low in impulse control, for example,being at increased risk for substance use. However, the experimental designs and analytictechniques used to date do not lend themselves to explicit tests of how within-personchange and within-person variability in incentive processing and cognitive control placeindividual adolescents at risk for substance use. For a more complete articulation of thesemodels, we highlight the promise and challenges of using intensive repeated measuresdata (encompassing 5 or more within-person measurement occasions) and associatedanalytic techniques. Use of intensive repeated measures will lend researchers the toolsrequired to make within-person inferences in individual adolescents that will ultimatelyalign cognitive neuroscience modes of adolescent substance use with the methodologicalframeworks used to test them.