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Cognitive control has long been a validated construct to explain risk for drug abuse. Research evidence suggests that cognitive-control interventions show promise for future preventive intervention and treatment efforts across development. Biomarkers of the efficacy of these interventions have also been identified. To examine the potential of utilizing developmental cognitive neuroscience to guide cognitive-control interventions for the prevention and treatment of substance use disorders, the National Institute on Drug Abuse held a research roundtable in Rockville, Maryland, in May 2010. The research presented at the roundtable and reviewed in this Special Section of Child Development Perspectives highlights the promise of cognitive-control interventions for enhancing, or ameliorating deficits in, executive functions relevant to substance use disorders, as well as the promise of neuroscience techniques for guiding the conceptualization of these interventions.

Emerging brain-imaging findings suggest that developmental differences in the structure and activity of brain regions involved in motivation and behavior control may contribute to risky behavior in adolescence. Adolescence may be characterized by robust motivational neurocircuitry that is relatively unhindered by developing cognitive control neurocircuitry. However, how developmental differences in brain structure or function depend on task features or other experimental contexts, or whether observed differences are functionally relevant for real-world risky behavior, is not well understood. The challenge of attributing adolescent risk taking to developmental patterns of brain morphology and brain activity underscores the need for future research sensitive to development and the contexts of adolescence.