Why Do Teenagers Break Rules ?

By Staff

Friday, February 13, 2009, 9:40

British scientists have finally figured out why its is though for the teenagers to agree to a different point of view. It is discovered that the ability of the teenagers is still at a budding stage.

This is called the 'theory of mind', the ability to infer another individual's prospective whether, intellectual, emotional or visual, only develop with age.

For their study the researchers made the kids watch a puppet show, 'Sally and Anne' playing. The puppets played with the marbles and placed them in a box. After Anne left, Sally grabbed the marbles, played with them and placed them in a bag instead.

The researchers quizzed the children about where will Anne look for the marbles. "Before four, kids say she''s going to look in the bag, but after four they know she has a false belief," New Scientist quoted Iroise Dumontheil, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London, UK, who led the new study.

Brain scans reveal that the teenage brains toil harder when trying to infer the outlook of others. The scientists also added that the brain's region responsible for theory of mind, the medial prefrontal cortex, develops through adolescence.

To find out if there was any behavioral results to biological changes, children, teenagers, adolescents and adults were tested on their ability to infer a different individual's prospective on a computer game. Volunteers- 179 females ranging in age from 7 to 27 - saw a bookshelf with a variety of different sized balls and other objects on four different rows.

Few of the objects sit in front of opaque backgrounds, obscured to someone standing on the other side of the shelf, while some sit in front of a see-through background. Participants were asked to adopt the perspective of a man standing on the other side of the shelf and move the small ball to the left, using a mouse. In a typical test, a golf ball and tennis ball are both visible to the participant, but the golf ball is obscured from the point of view of the observer.

The correct response, then, is to move the tennis ball. The results showed that kids under 10 years of age moved the incorrect ball about three-quarters of the trials, children aged 10 to 13 scored better, where as the teens got the answer wrong on two-third of the trial. The adults scored a decent 50-50.
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