More activation overall
The researchers found that among teenagers, all voices elicited greater activation in several brain regions compared with younger children: the voice-selective superior temporal sulcus, an auditory processing area; salience processing regions that filter which information is important; and the posterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in aspects of autobiographical and social memory. Brain responses to voices increased with teens’ age — in fact, the relationship was so strong researchers could use the voice-response information in teens’ brain scans to predict how old they were.
What distinguished teenagers from younger children was that unfamiliar voices elicited greater activity than Mom’s voice in the nucleus accumbens of the reward-processing system and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in assigning value to social information. The switch toward unfamiliar voices happened in these brain centers between 13 and 14 years of age, and there was no difference between boys and girls.
The research will aid in studying what happens in the brains of adolescents with autism and other conditions that affect how they tune into voices and other social stimuli. Younger kids with autism don’t have as strong a brain response to their mothers’ voices as typically developing children, the Stanford team has found.
Voices are really what connect us.
The team is excited to have uncovered the foundations of teens’ ability to tune into new people, an important part of humans’ overall engagement with voices. The fact that the brain is so attuned to voices makes intuitive sense — just ask anyone who has ever felt an emotional jolt at hearing a friend’s or family member’s voice after a long time, the researchers said.
“The voices in our environment are this incredibly rewarding sound source that allow us to feel connected, included, part of a community and part of a family,” Abrams said. “Voices are really what connect us.”
Children’s social interactions undergo a major transformation during adolescence. “Our findings demonstrate that this process is rooted in neurobiological changes,” Menon said. “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.”
The paper’s other Stanford authors are former research assistant Amanda Baker and former research scientist Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD. Study authors are members of the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Bio-X, and the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grants K01 MH102428, DC011095, MH084164, DC017950 and DC017950-S1), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Singer Foundation, and the Simons Foundation/SFARI. Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences also supported the work.
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