According to new research, teen brains no longer find moms' voices rewarding and start to tune into unfamiliar voices at age 13.
The first detailed explanation of how teens begin to separate from their parents was given by the researchers in the Journal of Neuroscience.
An adolescent knows to tune into novel voices just as an infant knows to tune into her mother's voice, according to the lead author.
You don't know you're doing this as a teen. You want to spend time with your friends and new friends and you are just being you. Your mind is attracted to these voices.
The researchers found that teens' brains are more receptive to all voices than the brains of children under 12.
The reward circuits and the brain centers that prioritize important stimuli are more activated by unfamiliar voices in teenage brains. The researchers say that the brain's shift toward new voices is an aspect of healthy maturation.
A child becomes independent at some point, and that has to be caused by an underlying biological signal, according to senior author Vinod Menon.
A study published in 2016 showed that kids can identify their mothers voices with high accuracy and that the special sound of Mom cues.
The mother's voice is the sound source that teaches young kids all about the social-emotional world and language development.
“When teens appear to be rebelling by not listening to their parents, it is because they are wired to pay more attention to voices outside their home.”
Teenagers 13 to 16 years of age were added to the previous study. All participants had an IQ of at least 80 and were being raised by their mothers. They didn't have any learning disorders or neurological disorders.
The mothers were recorded saying three nonsense words. The participants would not respond to nonsense words. Two women unfamiliar with the study subjects were recorded saying the same nonsense words. Each teenage participant listened to a series of nonsense-word recordings by their mother and unfamiliar women, presented in random order, and identified when they heard their mom. Teens know their mothers' voices more than 99% of the time.
The teens were placed in a magnetic resonance scanning device, where they listened to the voice recordings again. They listened to recordings of household sounds, such as a dishwasher running, to see how the brain responds to voices.
The researchers found that all voices activated the same parts of the brain as younger children: the voice-selective superior temporal sulcus, the salience processing areas and the anterior cingulate cortex.
The relationship between teens' brain responses to voices and their age was so strong that researchers could use it to predict how old they were.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens of the reward-processing system are involved in assigning value to social information.
There was no difference between boys and girls when the brain centers were 13 and 14 years old.
The research will help find out what happens in the brains of adolescents with conditions that affect how they tune into voices and other social stimuli. The researchers found that younger kids with the condition don't have the same brain response to their mothers' voices.
The team is excited to have found the foundations of teens' ability to tune into new people, an important part of humans. The researchers say that the fact that the brain is so sensitive to voices makes sense.
The voices in our environment allow us to feel connected, included, and part of a family.
Children's social interactions change during adolescence.
The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Singer Foundation, and the Simons Foundation/SFARI.
The source is the university.
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