Juliet Davidow, an assistant professor of psychology, received a NSF CAREER Award to study how motivated learning develops in the adolescent brain.
When Juliet Davidow was a teenager, she noticed something curious: Even though she and her friends shared similar life experiences, their outcomes often looked very different.
“Some teens I was friends with came through their adolescence relatively unscathed, whereas others were less fortunate,” says Davidow, an assistant professor of psychology at Northeastern University.
That early observation sparked a lasting interest in how people grow and change. In college, Davidow began studying how the human brain develops over time — and how that development influences thoughts, emotions and behavior.
“But I was shocked to discover that despite the (obvious to me) importance of adolescence as a life stage, science knew almost nothing about brain-behavior changes in this time,” Davidow says.
Even today, she says, many psychological models of development largely skip over adolescence.
At the same time Davidow was beginning her studies, researchers were uncovering key insights into the adolescent brain. They found that the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, personality and self-control — matures later than the brain systems that process rewards.
People began describing adolescents as “a car with no brakes — all drive and no control,” Davidow says.
“This puzzled me because this same network in the brain that processes rewards and its connections to the prefrontal cortex were the key regions of the brain’s goal-directed learning system,” she says.
Determined to better understand adolescence — and why it’s often misunderstood — Davidow has devoted her career to studying the teenage brain. Recently, she received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award to explore how motivated learning develops during this critical period of life.
Davidow describes adolescence as a cultural concept marking the stage of life when a person is no longer a child but not yet an adult.
“Our society has really aligned this time of life with school stages,” Davidow says. “Middle school, high school and college really overlap with what we think of as early, proper and later adolescence, or transitioning into early adulthood.”
In 2020, Davidow founded the Learning and Brain Development Lab at Northeastern. Her lab explores how the growing brain supports different psychological processes during adolescence, including becoming independent, learning to make decisions, forming one’s identity and defining personal values.
Recent theoretical work in the field, she says, suggests that motivated learning is particularly important in adolescence. Motivated learning describes adolescents exploring new behaviors and learning from the outcomes of their actions — good or bad.
While this learning process helps teenagers adapt and prepare for adulthood, Davidow says, it can also be particularly challenging when there is conflict. For example, a teenager might want a high SAT score but also want to attend a party the night before the test.
“We know surprisingly little about neurocognitive development and how different forms of motivated learning interact, nor what factors might drive cooperation vs. competition among different forms of learning,” she says. “Given that it is typical that motivations are changing during adolescence, it’s vital that we gain a better understanding of the role of motivational learning in this life stage.”
Davidow’s research will study individuals between the ages of 9 and 29.
“We want to be able to see people a little bit before the time that we’re most interested in and then a little bit later than the time we’re most interested in to capture as much of that window as possible as well as the variability that people experience,” she says.
To do this, she’ll use behavioral tests like interactive games, along with brain imaging and computational modeling, to examine multiple types of motivated learning at three levels: behavioral, mechanistic and neural.
Her goal is to understand how different forms of motivated learning affect performance in children, adolescents and young adults — and how those effects may shift with age.
Computational modeling will help identify the mental processes — such as memory, attention, perception, reasoning, problem-solving and language — that support successful learning and determine whether these processes change over time.
Brain imaging will reveal how learning systems develop and interact with other brain regions to support performance at different stages of development.
Davidow is also working with Valur Olafsson, technical director of the Northeastern University Biomedical Imaging Center, who has developed a new method for measuring dopamine — a neurotransmitter that plays a central role in the brain’s reward system and mood regulation.
Although dopamine can be measured using PET scans, those involve radioactive chemicals and are typically used in medical settings. Olafsson’s approach tracks the accumulation of iron in brain tissue, which results from dopamine activity, offering a safer and more accessible alternative.
Davidow says this research will help separate the effects of motivation from other cognitive processes that shape learning — and identify when adolescents may be most vulnerable to disruption or most receptive to support.
Beyond research, Davidow is committed to science education and community outreach. With the support of the CAREER award, she plans to work with Boston Latin Academy to show high school students what they could be doing as scientists.
Davidow and her lab team have previously done similar work both on Northeastern’s Boston campus as well as with local public schools. They have taught young people about their growing brains and discussed opportunities available for careers in STEM.
Last summer, the lab provided internships to high school students, who learned coding, analyzing brain data, giving presentations and reading scientific journal articles.
“With the support of this award, we can further develop this program over the next five years,” Davidow says. “We can ask community members about their own ideas and needs and figure out the best way to make those opportunities available to the people who would benefit the most from them.”