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Children's brains light up at mother's voice
MRI scans of children listening to their mother's voices reveal regions of the brain lighting up in response [cbsnews.com]. The brain response doesn't occur at the sound of other women. The children were scanned while listening to the sound of their own mothers saying three nonsense words and the sound of other women saying three nonsense words for comparison. Nonsense words were selected to avoid the possibility of activating other regions of the brain that might be involved in other functions such as linguistic processing.
Previous studies have shown that children favor their mother's voice, but the underlying mechanism for this preference was unclear.
"Nobody had really looked at the brain circuits that might be engaged," explained senior study author Vinod Menon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford. "We wanted to know: Is it just auditory and voice-selective areas that respond differently, or is it more broad in terms of engagement, emotional reactivity and detection of salient stimuli?"
To answer these questions, researchers analyzed the brain scans of children listening to their mother's voices.
The children in the study were 7 to 12, which surprised me - I see babies delighting in the sound of their mother's voices, but I have definitely seen a lot of 7 to 12 year olds who didn't sound delighted to hear their mothers at all. I guess none of these children were engaged in any mischief - maybe that could be a new variable for a future study.
