Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s article in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience about the social brain in adolescence highlights the undeniable social cognition and behavioral changes that accompany adolescence. She describes the way these changes occur alongside functional changes in the social brain, defined as the “network of brain regions that are involved in understanding others.” Providing mostly evidence from fMRIs, but also from EEGs and brain lesions, she concludes that particularly the medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus are focal regions in the brain that undergo functional and structural changes throughout adolescence. Studies suggest that certain prefrontal activity increases from childhood to adolescence, then decreases from early adolescence to adulthood, which may be explained by elimination of unused synapses. In addition, adolescents seem to have higher levels of activity in the prefrontal cortex with face-processing, mentalizing tasks, and emotion-recognition than do adults.
Blakemore also points out that many questions are still unanswered, including how the environment influences brain development in adolescence and what triggers reorganization of synapses during puberty. Such questions regarding adolescent behavioral changes should not be simply studied using neurobiology, but also considering hormonal and social differences. Regardless, the adolescent social brain is a relatively unpopular topic of research, which makes this article even more intriguing. Hopefully more speculations will spur further studies that may affect education, upbringing, legal treatment, mental illnesses, etc. for adolescents.
It is interesting that adolescents have higher activity in the prefrontal cortex than adults. Although adolescents may show more activity in the region involved in face-processing, mentalizing, and emotion-recognition, I would think adults would be more successful in these types of tasks, considering their greater years of life experience. I wonder what determines how the changes in the brain (between the three life stages mentioned) are different or similar in various people, and if it is possible to infer what type of sociability level a child will develop.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jamie, I found it very interesting that adolescents have higher activity when processing faces and mentalizing tasks. I am in an adolescence psychology course that emphasizes how the pre-frontal cortex is less developed than adults, so I am curious how the high activity corresponds with their adolescent stage of development.
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