Summary: Beginning around age 13, adolescents stop finding their mother’s voice uniquely rewarding and become more drawn to unfamiliar voices. A new Stanford study using functional MRI maps the neurobiological changes that accompany this shift and explains how it supports adolescents’ growing independence and social engagement beyond the family.
Source: Stanford
When teenagers act like they do not hear their parents, it is not always willful ignoring. Their brains literally respond differently to parental voices than they did when they were younger.
Researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine found that around 13 years of age, adolescents’ brains no longer treat their mother’s voice as uniquely rewarding. Instead, they show increased neural sensitivity to unfamiliar voices. The findings, published April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience, use brain imaging to provide a detailed neurobiological account of how adolescents begin to shift focus away from caregivers and toward peers and other social partners.
“Just as infants are biologically primed to tune into their mother’s voice, adolescents become primed to attend to novel voices,” said lead author Daniel Abrams, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “Teens don’t need to decide to do this consciously. Their growing social world—friends and new companions—naturally draws their attention, and their brains become more attracted to unfamiliar voices.”
The study shows that adolescent brains, compared with younger children, are broadly more responsive to voices in general—including their mothers’—which matches teenagers’ heightened interest in many social cues. Crucially, however, reward systems and brain regions that prioritize socially important signals respond more strongly to nonfamilial voices than to the mother’s voice during adolescence. The researchers interpret this shift as a normal and healthy part of maturation that helps teens form social ties beyond the family.
Age-related shift toward new voices
Previous work from the Stanford team demonstrated that children under 12 show a powerful, specialized response to their mother’s voice: it activates auditory processing centers and also recruits reward, emotion, visual processing, and salience networks—areas that are not similarly engaged by unfamiliar voices. That earlier research showed that even fetuses and infants can recognize and prefer their mother’s voice, highlighting how important that signal is in early social and language development.
Building on those findings, the new study added adolescents aged 13 to 16.5 and compared their brain responses with those of younger children. All participants had IQs of 80 or higher, were raised by their biological mothers, and had no diagnosed neurological, psychiatric, or learning disorders.
To isolate voice recognition from linguistic content, researchers recorded each mother saying three brief nonsense words, then recorded the same nonsense words from two unfamiliar women. Adolescents listened to repeated presentations of these recordings and identified when they heard their own mother; like younger children, teens correctly identified their mothers’ voices more than 97% of the time. Next, while undergoing functional MRI, participants listened to the same voice recordings and to short non-social household sounds (for example, a dishwasher) so researchers could compare responses to voices versus other auditory stimuli.
Greater overall voice activation and a reward-system switch
Compared with children, teenagers showed greater activation across a number of regions when hearing voices: the voice-selective superior temporal sulcus (an auditory area), salience-processing regions that help determine what information is important, and the posterior cingulate cortex, which supports autobiographical and social memory. Voice-evoked brain responses also increased steadily with age; the researchers found these neural signatures so consistent that voice-response patterns alone could predict a teen’s age.
What sets adolescents apart is a shift in reward and valuation circuits. In teens, unfamiliar voices produced stronger activity than the mother’s voice in the nucleus accumbens (a key reward center) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (a region involved in assigning social value). This change emerged between ages 13 and 14 and was observed in both boys and girls.
These results illuminate how typical adolescent development reorients social motivation toward nonfamilial partners, a change that supports independence and broader social learning. The findings also provide a framework for studying conditions in which voice processing and social attention are atypical. Earlier work by the group suggests that children with autism, for example, often show weaker neural responses to their mothers’ voices than typically developing children.
“Voices are a uniquely powerful social signal,” said Vinod Menon, PhD, the study’s senior author. “They connect us to family and community. The shift we observed reflects a biological signal that helps adolescents engage the wider social world and form relationships outside the home.”
Understanding these neurobiological changes clarifies why teens may seem to “not listen” to parents: their brains are wired to pay more attention to voices outside the family as part of natural maturation. The research team views this reorientation as an adaptive step in social development that readies adolescents for adult social life.
Other Stanford contributors to the paper include former research assistant Amanda Baker and former research scientist Aarthi Padmanabhan, PhD. The authors are affiliated with the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Bio-X, and the Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute.
Funding: The study received support from 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 provided support.
About this neurodevelopment research news
Author: Erin Digitale
Source: Stanford
Contact: Erin Digitale – Stanford
Image: Credit to Stanford
Original Research: “A neurodevelopmental shift in reward circuitry from mother’s to nonfamilial voices in adolescence” by Daniel A. Abrams, Percy K. Mistry, Amanda E. Baker, Aarthi Padmanabhan, and Vinod Menon. Journal of Neuroscience (closed access).
Abstract
A neurodevelopmental shift in reward circuitry from mother’s to nonfamilial voices in adolescence
Early childhood social worlds center on parents and caregivers, who shape social and cognitive development. Adolescence brings a reliable shift in social orientation toward nonfamilial peers—an adaptive change that supports independence. Using functional imaging of voice processing in children and adolescents (ages 7–16), this study identifies distinct neural signatures in reward and valuation systems (notably nucleus accumbens and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) that mark this transition. Younger children show stronger reward-region responses to their mother’s voice than to unfamiliar voices; older adolescents display the reverse pattern, with heightened responses to nonfamilial voices. These findings pinpoint how reward and social-valuation systems underlie adolescents’ changing social focus and provide a template for studying developmental shifts in social motivation in clinical populations with social communication challenges.