It's not that teenagers aren't trying to learn. (Well, OK, some of them definitely aren't trying.) But the distractions that come with being a teenager are exacerbated by the fact that teens just don't learn as quickly as either young kids or adults, and a new study of mice that appears in Science points to specific brain changes that might help explain why. Seeking to study spatial learning during puberty, the team
devised a relatively complex task (at least for a mouse) that requires learning how to avoid a moving platform that delivers a very mild shock [TIME]
. While the prepubescent mice picked up on what to avoid pretty quickly, as did adult mice, pubescent mice took considerably longer to figure it out. The key to these differences was what study leader Sheryl Smith saw in the brains of these mice. Building on their own previous work that showed ...
