Recent work by CNBC researchers published in Cerebral Cortex provide evidence that age-related reductions of sensitivity to reward are tied to neurodevelopment processes, specifically, changes in the influence of affective systems on the control of behavior. As many parents know (and might remember in their own case!), adolescence is a period of heightened reward-seeking. This has been thought to be driven by an imbalance in the influence of affective and cognitive control brain systems on behavior. Larsen et al. tested this hypothesis by first identifying areas of the striatum (a brain region involved in biasing action selection) that integrate corticostriatal projections from cortical brain systems involved in affective and cognitive control processes. They then assessed how the relative structural integrity of connections to these “convergent zones” changes with age. A critical finding is that the relative integrity of affective projections to striatal convergence zones decreases with age while cognitive control projections remain developmentally stable, resulting in a heightened relative influence of affective systems on behavior early in adolescence that wanes into adulthood. The first author, Bart Larsen (Pitt Psychology and CNBC), is a graduate student with Bea Luna (Pitt Psychology, Psychology and Pediatrics and CNBC). Tim Verstynen (CMU Psych and CNBC) and Fang Chen Yeh (Pitt Neurological Surgery) were also additional faculty authors. These findings provide new evidence that developmental differences in the integration of corticostriatal systems involved in affect and cognitive control underlie known developmental decreases in the propensity for reward-driven behavior into adulthood.