Adolescence is primarily characterized by puberty (Vijayakumar et al., 2018) which demarcates sexual maturation that can start as young as 10–12 years of age (Parent et al., 2003) and proceeds until adult independence, which may continue until the mid-twenties (National Research Council, 2013). Adolescence is characterized as a time of a peak in sensation seeking (Chambers et al., 2003; Spear, 2000), the drive to explore novel experiences that generate increased sensations, despite possible long-term negative consequences (Zuckerman, 2008). While sensation seeking can be adaptive, including information seeking and exploration, to gain new experiences needed to optimally develop into an independent adult, it can also lead to risk-taking behavior, due to decision-making processes that weigh short-term rewards over long-term risks to survival. In fact, adolescents in the United States experience a four-fold increase in deaths over US adults due to risk-taking behaviors (e.g., crime, substance use, reckless driving) (Eaton et al., 2012). Thus, adolescents are often believed to lack forethought and behave in volatile and unpredictable ways. Adolescent peaks in sensation seeking, however, are present across species (Hodes & Shors, 2005; Stansfield & Kirstein, 2006) and across cultures (Steinberg et al., 2018), underscoring their adaptive nature. Adolescence is also a time for vulnerability to the emergence of psychopathology such as schizophrenia, mood disorders, anxiety, suicidality, and addiction (Paus et al., 2008). This adolescent vulnerability for emergence of psychopathology suggests that maturational processes unique to this period may impair development and/or reveal impairments that are present but unseen until puberty, becoming apparent as the brain transitions through adolescence and into adulthood. Thus, there is great interest in understanding the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie normative development to identify brain processes that may contribute to impaired development in adolescence.