THE ESSENTIAL
- When teenagers heard any voice, their superior temporal sulcus became more active as they grew.
- In young children, the brain reacts more to the mother’s voice than to other voices
“The social world of children changes in adolescence. While the socialization of young children revolves around parents and caregivers, adolescence is characterized by a change in social orientation towards non-family members”, said researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine in the United States. In a study published in the journal The Journal of Neuroscience on April 28, the team clarified that this change was observed in the neural activity of adolescents as young as 13 years old.
“When young children hear their mother’s voice, certain regions of their brain show greater activity than when they hear unfamiliar and unfamiliar voices. It is striking that older adolescents exhibit the opposite effect, with increased activity for the voices of non-family members relative to their mother’s voice”, can we read in the works.
From the age of 13, the brain of adolescents reacts more to the voices of strangers than to that of their mother
To arrive at this discovery, the authors asked mothers to utter meaningless words and record themselves. They then played these recordings to their children and teenagers aged 7 to 16 while they did functional brain and human sound MRIs. The examination highlighted the regions of the brain that activated when the participants listened to the recordings. The scientists also played other sounds in which the young volunteers heard the voices of unfamiliar people.
According to the results, the teenagers still accurately recognized their mother’s voice, but from a certain age, generally between 13 and 14 years old, their brain began to react less to the sounds emitted by their mother and to be more receptive. to the voice of people who are not part of their family.
According to the researchers, this work helps confirm theories that the brain develops to respond to a changing environment. As a child grows, he must learn to socialize and his brain helps him in this process by paying less attention to his mother and more to strangers.