Project description
How adolescent risk-taking affects adult behaviour
Adolescent risk-taking, despite seeming dangerous, could support psychosocial progress, which positively impacts adult behaviour. Dopamine system changes might explain why adolescents take fewer risks as they mature. It could also explain gender differences in how choices are made. This has long-term effects on behaviour. The ERC-funded DeMARRe project aims to study how teenage risk-taking shapes behaviour and neural circuits to enhance adult functioning. The project will explore individual decision-making in male and female mice across development. It will use several experimental approaches, including advanced techniques to map brain activity and dopamine system changes from adolescence to adulthood. The study is expected to reveal how these changes influence decision-making.
Objective
Adolescents take more risks than adults do, contributing to the conventional framing of this period as one of great vulnerability. Surprisingly however, teenagers who engage in some degree of risk-taking exhibit more favorable psychosocial trajectories compared to those who avoid risks. This raises the intriguing possibility that taking risks during adolescence may, in fact, have enduring positive effects on adult behavior. The core objective of this proposal is to unravel the neural basis of how taking risks during adolescence can drive behavioral and neural circuit adaptations that promote resilience in adulthood.
Risk-taking behavior can be studied in the context of decision making, where adolescents are more likely to explore risky choices, such as those with an uncertain outcome, than adults are. Strategy implementation under uncertainty conditions in adults is highly individualistic and is linked to activity in the dopamine system. As dopamine circuits develop during adolescence in a sex-specific manner, their maturation may contribute not only to the reduction in risk-taking observed between adolescence and adulthood, but also to sex differences in how risk modulates decision-making strategy. Finally, dopamine circuits may carry a neural imprint of the enduring positive effects on adult behavior.
Here, I propose a concerted, multilevel experimental approach that builds from longitudinal behavioral and computational analyses of individualistic mouse decision-making across postnatal life in male and female mice. Embedding this core framework within sophisticated activity-mapping and network-manipulation techniques will allow me to dissect changes in dopaminergic networks during the transition from adolescence to adulthood that underlie decision-making strategy refinement, and to investigate whether this network refinement facilitates cognitive processes in adults, and, in turn, confers resilience against drug-taking and stress.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
75794 PARIS
France
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