# Examining Longitudinal Cognitive-Motivational Interactions in Adolescents with Depression

> **NIH NIH K23** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $194,940

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT
 Depression is a debilitating psychiatric illness that commonly emerges during adolescence, a period of
dynamic brain and behavioral development. Cognitive and motivational deficits are prominent in depression
and occur in neural systems that undergo adolescent-specific developmental changes. Given the emergence
of these deficits in the context of ongoing development, a better understanding of how cognition and motivation
interact in adolescent depression is critical for designing prevention strategies and treatments.
 I am proposing complementary studies designed to examine cognitive-motivational interactions in
adolescent depression, and provide me the training I need to become an independent investigator focused on
the neurobiology of cognition and emotion in developmental psychopathology. With my primary mentor, Dr.
Anticevic, I have designed an incentivized spatial working memory paradigm for neuroimaging that has been
translated from classic tasks in non-human primates, and adapted to measure the effects of incentives on
spatial working memory accuracy. We propose to use this task in adolescents with depression and
neurotypical peers in order to examine differences in spatial working memory and incentivized spatial working
memory performances, and the neural circuits underlying each. All participants will be followed longitudinally to
compare the impact of depression and typical development in these circuits. They will return at 9 months after
the first visit to chart symptoms and behavior, and at 18 months to chart symptoms, behavior, and repeat the
incentivized spatial working memory neuroimaging paradigm. To complement our cross-sectional study of
adolescent depression, we propose to characterize the variation in cognition and motivation in a large group of
typically developing children from the multi-site Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. We
will apply data-driven methods to cognitive and motivational measures collected by the ABCD study and
quantify the shared neurobehavioral variation that may distinguish cognitive-motivational phenotypes. This
characterization would serve as a vital platform for future studies to examine risk for depression in
adolescence.
 The proposed set of studies provides training in developmental research and neuroimaging,
longitudinal study design and analysis, and data-driven analytics applied to neurodevelopmental questions. My
mentors are a multi-disciplinary team of experts based mostly at Yale who will guide and support me in
achieving these training goals. Collectively, this K23 application provides the vital additional training and
experiences I need to successfully transition to an independent physician-scientist focused on the neurobiology
of cognition and emotion in developmental psychopathology.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9871295
- **Project number:** 1K23MH121778-01
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** YOUNGSUN T CHO
- **Activity code:** K23 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $194,940
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-07-01 → 2025-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9871295

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9871295, Examining Longitudinal Cognitive-Motivational Interactions in Adolescents with Depression (1K23MH121778-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9871295. Licensed CC0.

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