[quote ArabellaScott]Also:
'Puberty represents a period of profound transition in terms of drives, emotions, motivations, psychology and social life. Recent preliminary evidence from developmental MRI studies has suggested that stage of puberty might play an important role in adolescent brain development, perhaps more so than chronological age'
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3410522/[/quote]
Think you’re over stating the evidence a bit there. This same study mostly talks about nonhuman animal studies, and when it addresses humans, the only cognitive studies down actually show decline in facial recognition ability during puberty and correlation between puberty hormones and an increase in risk taking/drug use/sensation seeking behaviour. So not really saying lack of puberty hormones= stuck with a child’s mental capacity and cognition.
“Very few neuroimaging studies have associated brain development with pubertal stage, and yet there is tentative evidence to suggest that puberty might play an important role in some aspects of brain and cognitive development.” p1
“In humans, however, there is very little understanding of the specific relationships between puberty and adolescent brain development.” p5
“Because age and pubertal maturation are often correlated (and age is easily measured with great precision and validity, while puberty is often estimated with rough categorical measures that are not easily validated), there is a need for studies with designs that explicitly disentangle puberty and age effects (e.g. recruiting samples that are the same age and grade level but differ on pubertal maturation, and then restudying longitudinally).” p7
“Only a small number of empirical behavioral studies have focused on the effect of puberty on a particular cognitive process. Some of the earliest studies focused on face processing. A study by Carey et al. [1980] showed that, while performance in a facial identity recognition task improved steadily during the first decade of life, this was followed by a decline in performance at approximately age 12. This decline may be due to puberty, rather than to age per se, as a later study showed that females at mid‐puberty performed worse those at pre‐ or postpuberty, when these groups were matched for age. More recently, evidence for a pubertal “dip” in facial emotion processing was shown [McGivern et al., 2002]. In this study, male and female participants aged 10–17 performed a match‐to‐sample task in which faces showing emotional expressions were matched with emotion words. An increase in reaction time of around 10–20% was shown at an age corresponding roughly to puberty onset (age 10–11 years in females, 11–12 in males), which then declined during adolescence to reach prepuberty levels at age 16–17.” p16
“For example, there is increasing evidence that adolescent changes in sensation‐seeking may include some puberty‐specific changes, and may provide new insights into adolescent risk taking. Sensation‐seeking is one of the developmental contributors to risk behaviors and is more likely to emerge during adolescence than any other time period [e.g. Arnett and Balle‐Jensen, 1993]. Sensation‐seeking tendencies appear to be more strongly linked to puberty than to age [Spear, 2000]. One of the first studies to demonstrate the specific link between sensation‐seeking and puberty focused on adolescents within the narrow age range of 11–14 years. Boys and girls with more advanced pubertal development had higher ratings of sensation seeking and greater drug use [Martin et al., 2002].” p18
“In summary, few studies as yet have investigated the link between puberty and cognitive development, and this area will be an interesting focus for future research.” p18
“Further behavioral and neuroimaging studies are needed in which accurate and reliable measures of puberty are taken, to shed light on how puberty hormones influence the development of brain structure and function. Clearly, there is great value in achieving a better understanding of the relationships between the brain, cognition, behavior, and puberty.” p20