Adolescent development of decision making processes in working memory and links to pubertal timing and tempo

Adolescence is associated with substantial improvements in cognitive performance, with faster and more accurate decisions, yet the underlying mechanisms and the role of pubertal maturation remain unclear. Pubertal maturation can be characterized by timing, capturing whether an individual reaches pubertal milestones before or after peers, and tempo, capturing how fast one progresses through puberty relative to peers. We applied computational modeling to examine developmental changes in decision making and working memory and tested whether pubertal timing and tempo explain variance beyond age. Using longitudinal data from 4201 participants (ages 9 – 17) in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive DevelopmentSM (ABCD Study®), we characterized the development of accuracy, response times, and drift diffusion model parameters from an n-back task with generalized additive mixed models. Next, we compared age-only and puberty-informed models to test whether pubertal timing and tempo explain variance in cognitive development.We observed non-linear improvements in performance and all model parameters, with the largest changes in drift rate and non-decision time, indicating more efficient processing and faster non-decision processes. Additional non-linear changes in decision threshold, capturing the speed-accuracy tradeoff, and choice bias suggest strategic shifts in response caution and task strategy. Pubertal maturation explained additional individual differences beyond age, with later timing and faster tempo associated with better performance.This study shows that improvements in n-back performance are accompanied by increased information processing efficiency, faster non-decision processes, and adaptive decision policies, with pubertal timing and tempo contributing to heterogeneity in cognitive development.