Brainlinks Adolescent Trust fMRI

This entry covers the MRI cohort of a preregistered study from Erasmus University Rotterdam on how adolescents decide whom to trust. Participants played a modified Trust Game in the scanner with three partners: a close friend they nominated, a member of the Dutch National Youth Council, and an unknown peer. The study related brain activity during these choices to the partner, to age and to how needed and useful participants felt. The images are not public. The processed data on DataverseNL can be requested from the first author, while the task materials and analysis code sit in separate open records.

Composition

The participants come from the third wave (October 2021 to June 2022) of Brainlinks, a longitudinal study of prosocial development in adolescence. Of 118 who returned at that wave, 106 completed the behavioral study, aged 12 to 23. Ten with MRI contraindications played the game on a laptop, one was dropped for head motion over 3 mm and one for mask distortion, which leaves 94 in the MRI sample (60 female, mean age 18.26 years, range 12.74 to 22.55). Participants were screened for neurological and psychiatric disorders at the first wave; by the third wave ten reported a clinician diagnosis, mostly ADHD or anxiety.

Acquisition

All scans used a 3T Philips Achieva TX with a standard whole-head coil in a session of about 45 minutes. It held a 3D T1-weighted scan at 1.1 mm isotropic, a resting-state fMRI scan and two Trust Game runs of 210 echo-planar volumes each (TR 2.2 s, TE 30 ms, 38 slices, 2.75 mm isotropic). Preprocessing and analysis used SPM12.

Known limitations

• No images are openly available, and the records state no data use terms.
• It is not stated whether raw or preprocessed MRI are included in what is shared on request.
• Figures come from the authors' preprint; the published article could not be opened for this entry.
• Single site, single scanner, collected during COVID-19 restrictions.