The pre-pubescent penchant for shenanigans is undeniable. But how our developing brains grow out of letting us make dopey decisions is still up for debate.

Researchers have speculated that the adolescent brain eventually gets better at shoving down those hankerings to commit acts of stupidity. But now a study on primates suggests that the brain may mature by getting better at forming alternate strategies.

By examining patterns of brain activity in male macaque monkeys before and after puberty, researchers found that their adult brains make smart choices not by suppressing foolish urges but by getting better at forming wise, goal-oriented plans. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may provide insight into how to treat patients who struggle with social and mental health problems due to cognitive immaturity, the authors suggest.

For the study, the monkeys were put through a standard antisaccade task, often used in humans to test the brain’s ability to suppress reflexive jerking of both eyes—a saccade—toward new visual cues. The monkeys were trained to focus on a green point on a screen and avoid looking at a distracting white square that would appear. Wherever the square appeared, the monkeys were supposed to glance in the opposite direction, squashing the yearning to look at the forbidden cue. In other words, if the white square appeared on the left side of the green point, the monkeys were supposed to briefly wiggle their eyes to the right.

Suppressing the urge to peek at the thing you’re not supposed to look at takes some mental prowess and impulse control. For devil-may-care pre-pubescent humans, who don’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex (the front of the brain that's involved in decision-making), this is a tough test. But adults can usually pull it off.

In the study, the researchers found that the monkeys were the same. When they tested the primates before they hit puberty, they averaged an F—successfully looking away from the white square only around 57 percent of the time. When the researchers tested the same monkeys again when they hit adulthood, they did better, bringing their average score to 80 percent.

When the researchers analyzed how neurons in young and adult monkeys' prefrontal cortices were firing during the tests, they found clear patterns that could explain what changed. While neural circuits of both young and adult monkeys lit up when the distracting cues appeared, the adults seemed to have brighter baseline brain activity related to the goal of focusing on the green point.

Thus, the authors concluded, it was not that the adult monkeys suppressed a childish mental response to ogle the forbidden white square but that they had formed a stronger mental determination to stay on task and stare at the green point before the diversion appeared.

While it’s still possible that other matured areas of the brain contributed to the improved test scores and brain development might be different in humans, the researchers are hopeful that the finding may help understand and treat patients who suffer from impaired cognitive maturity.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1518147113 (About DOIs).