Cognitive control deployment is flexibly modulated by social value in early adolescence

Recent mechanistic models of cognitive control define the normative level of control deployment as a function of the effort cost of exerting control balanced against the reward that can be attained by exerting control. Despite these models explaining empirical findings in adults, prior literature has suggested that adolescents may not adaptively integrate value into estimates of how much cognitive control they should deploy. Moreover, much work in adolescent neurodevelopment casts social valuation processes as competing with, and in many cases overwhelming, cognitive control in adolescence. Here, we test whether social incentives can adaptively increase cognitive control. Adolescents (Mage  = 14.64, 44 male, N = 87) completed an incentivized cognitive control task in which they could exert cognitive control to receive rewards on behalf of real peers who were rated by all peers in their school grade as being of either high- or low-status. Using Bayesian modeling, we find robust evidence that adolescents exert more cognitive control for high- relative to low-status peers. Moreover, we demonstrate that social incentives, irrespective of their high- or low-status, boost adolescent cognitive control above baseline control where no incentives are offered. Findings support the hypothesis that the cognitive control system in early adolescence is flexibly modulated by social value.