Katie Insel
Assistant Professor of Psychology
PhD, Psychology, Harvard University, 2019
Neuroscientist Katie Insel studies child and adolescent brain development to better understand how youth learn, make decisions, and pursue their goals. Her research investigates how kids and teens build cognitive skills to handle the challenges of daily life. She also examines the links between brain development and wellbeing to explain why adolescence coincides with a sudden rise in mental health disorders. Her lab uses multimodal approaches, including novel behavioral tasks, functional neuroimaging (fMRI), and computational modeling. Insel is committed to translating science to inform policy, and she works with policy-makers, lawyers, educators, and clinicians to help translate basic science to inform real world applications.
Insel’s research has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health. Her research has been recognized by awards from the Association for Psychological Science, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Flux Society for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society. Before joining Northwestern, Insel was a postdoctoral fellow working at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. She is the director of the CATS Lab at Northwestern.
Current Research
Neuroscience of motivation and decision-making. Insel examines how incentives, like rewards and punishments, influence decision-making across development. Her research investigates how incentives are processed in the brain, and how these neural responses change as the brain matures. She has found that adolescents exhibit dampened responses in the brain to aversive outcomes when compared to adults. These findings have important implications for real-world behaviors, like risk-taking, which peaks during adolescence. Adolescents might be more likely to take risks because they underestimate the potential negative outcomes of their actions. Yet, at the same time, this profile may be adaptive for promoting exploration and novelty seeking, which helps cultivate a healthy transition to independence. Ongoing work is examining how rewards and punishments influence learning and memory during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Insel’s research also examines how changing motivational states influence emotional responses, mood, and day-to-day fluctuations in behavior.
Brain development of goal-directed behavior. Insel’s research seeks to understand how children, adolescents, and adults pursue their goals. Her work examines how individuals make cost-benefit decisions about when to work hard and exert cognitive effort. Adults typically work harder and perform better on difficult cognitive tasks when high-value rewards are at stake. However, Insel has found that youth are less likely to adjust their effort and cognitive performance when high-value rewards are at stake. Her research has found that changes in brain connectivity that emerge with age during adolescence can account for these developmental differences in goal-directed behavior. Ongoing work aims to identify when and how incentives can help or hinder adolescent performance and what happens when goals become too difficult. Additional research is investigating how different types of goals influence how children and adolescents prioritize what to learn and remember. This research could inform real-world situations that support the cognitive performance of youth, both in and out of the classroom.
Development of psychopathology: risk and resilience. Rates of depression significantly increase during adolescence, and nearly 20% of adolescents are experiencing elevated symptoms of depression. Youth with depression often encounter difficulties with motivation, and they can experience weakened enjoyment or pleasure. Neuroscience research can show how depression impacts the neural circuitry that is important for reward processing and motivated behavior in youth. Insel has found that adolescents with depression exhibit different brain responses to rewards when compared to typically developing youth. These findings can help explain why teens with depression experience difficulties with motivation and reward learning in daily life. Ongoing work in Insel’s lab is examining how differences in reward processing influence learning and memory. In a new line of research, she is measuring individual trajectories of brain development in children and adolescents to identify how brain states fluctuate with changing mood states or stressful experiences. The goal of this research is to better understand within-person change over time to identify brain and behavioral markers that present risk and resilience for psychopathology.
Selected Publications
Cohen, A. and C. Insel. 2023. More than just a phase: adolescence as a window into how the brain generates behavior. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/pg6ft.
Insel, C., S. Tabashneck, F. Shen, J. Edersheim, and R. Kinscherff. 2022. White Paper on the Science of Late Adolescence: A Guide for Judges, Attorneys, and Policy Makers. Center for Law, Brain, & Behavior. 10.13140/RG.2.2.10160.64008.
Insel, C., J. Davidow, and L. Somerville. 2020. Neurodevelopmental Processes That Shape the Emergence of Value-Guided Goal-Directed Behavior. In The Cognitive Neurosciences, eds. D. Poeppel, G. Mangun, M. Gazzaniga, 969–76. MIT Press.
Insel, C., M. Charifson, and L. Somerville. 2019. Neurodevelopmental shifts in learned value transfer on cognitive control during adolescence. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 40: 100730.
Insel, C., C. Glenn, M. Nock, and L. Somerville. 2019. Aberrant striatal tracking of reward magnitude in youth with current or past-year depression. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 128(1): 44–56.
Insel, C. and L. Somerville. 2018. Asymmetric neural tracking of gain and loss magnitude during adolescence. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 13(8): 785–96.
Davidow, J., C. Insel, and L. Somerville. 2018. Adolescent development of value-guided goal pursuit. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 22(8): 725–36.
Insel, C., E. Kastman, C. Glenn, and L. Somerville. 2017. Development of corticostriatal connectivity constrains goal directed behavior during adolescence. Nature Communications 8: 1605.
