Adolescence and response time

Before movement, who prepares the field?

Before an adolescent presses a button, many things have already happened.

The eye saw.

Attention selected.

The body compared.

The rule entered.

Doubt appeared.

A possible response was prepared.

The hand has not moved yet, but the body-territory has already begun to decide.

It is in this almost invisible interval — before movement appears — that the article “Age-Related Differences in Response Time Across Adolescence Reflect Premotor, but Not Motor, Processing Speed”, by William Slawson, Greg Hajcak, Bob McMurray, and Bruce D. Bartholow, becomes so important.

The study investigated whether response-time differences across adolescence come mainly from premotor processes, such as response selection and preparation, or from motor processes, such as movement execution. The authors evaluated 204 adolescents, aged 14 to 19, during a flanker task with EEG, using the lateralized readiness potential, or LRP, to separate response time into premotor and motor components. The central finding was that premotor speed, and not motor speed, explained an important part of response-time improvement with age.

The initial question seems simple:

did the adolescent respond faster because the movement improved, or because the field that prepares movement matured?

But in the current world, this question must grow.

Because adolescence today does not happen only among school, family, street, sport, body, and friendship.

It also happens inside a post-social-media world.

Post-smartphone.

Post-generative AI.

Inside platforms that dispute attention, modulate reward, organize comparison, and monetize permanence.

So the question becomes deeper:

before movement, who prepares the field?

The adolescent’s body-territory?

Or the invisible architecture of platforms?

The strength of the article

The strength of the study lies in not treating response time as a single measure.

Often, when someone responds quickly, we say:

“they were more agile.”

But agility can hide different processes.

Maybe the person executed the movement faster.

But maybe they decided earlier.

Selected better.

Inhibited better.

Organized the field better before action.

The article shows precisely this: in adolescence, the reduction in response time seems to depend more on premotor processing than on motor execution itself. In other words, the body did not simply become “faster at moving.” It became faster at preparing action.

This detail changes many things.

Adolescence stops being seen only as a phase of impulsivity, slowness, or immaturity.

It begins to appear as a period in which the body-territory refines the passage between perception, rule, selection, inhibition, decision, and movement.

Before the gesture, there is field

Before the button is pressed, there is a field.

The stimulus enters.

The body evaluates.

Attention organizes itself.

The competing response needs to be inhibited.

The task rule needs to be maintained.

The hand begins to prepare.

Only then does movement appear.

The visible gesture is the last part of a chain.

That is why the article is precious: it helps show that response time does not begin in the finger.

It begins before.

It begins in the body organizing itself before the world.

But outside the laboratory, the adolescent does not respond only to arrows on a screen.

They respond to notifications.

Likes.

Messages.

Short videos.

Comparisons.

Calls.

Idealized bodies.

Performed success.

Accelerated desire.

Fear of exclusion.

Public image.

AI generating answers.

Algorithms offering stimuli before the body has time to choose.

Each stimulus enters the body-territory and disputes the premotor field.

It disputes attention before decision.

It disputes tension before gesture.

It disputes reward before choice.

It disputes lived time before movement.

Adolescence in the post-social-media world

The book “The Anxious Generation,” by Jonathan Haidt, popularized a strong hypothesis: the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood may have participated in a major reconfiguration of youth development. The movement associated with the book proposes four norms: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world.

This reading must be used responsibly.

Social media does not explain everything.

Anxiety, depression, attention, sleep, body, family, school, inequality, violence, precarity, pandemic, culture, and economy also cross adolescence.

But it would be irresponsible to ignore that digital platforms have become a central ecological force.

According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social media and youth mental health, up to 95% of young people aged 13 to 17 report using some social platform, and more than one third report using social media “almost constantly.” The same document notes that robust independent analyses on the safety of these platforms for young people are still lacking.

Therefore, the issue is not to moralize technology.

The issue is to ask:

what kind of adolescent body-territory is being formed when the field before movement is continuously modulated by platforms designed to capture attention?

Capta, monetization, and attentional hijacking

The statistical data produced by platforms are not neutral.

They are Capta.

Captured traces.

Clicks.

Pauses.

Likes.

Screen time.

Time-on-platform.

Compulsive return.

Sleep interruption.

Repeated comparison.

Fixed gaze.

Displacement of desire.

These Capta enter monetization models.

The platform learns where the adolescent stops.

Where they hesitate.

Where they desire.

Where they feel fear.

Where they compare.

Where they return.

Where they lose time.

Where they give attention.

In this sense, the problem is not only “excessive screen use.”

The problem is an economic architecture that turns the adolescent premotor field into a surface of extraction.

Before the adolescent moves the finger, the platform has already prepared part of the field.

Before the response, modulation has already occurred.

Before movement, capture has already happened.

The article’s question, then, gains another layer:

movement, or the field that prepares movement?

In the laboratory, the field is the task.

In digital life, the field is an ecology of monetized stimuli.

Movement as the origin of lived time

In the 5D Body-Territory reading, time is not an abstract line separated from the body.

Lived time is born from movement.

But movement here is not only physical displacement.

Movement is the reorganization of the internal traces that a stimulus leaves in the body-territory.

When the adolescent sees the task stimulus, something moves before the hand.

Attention moves.

Inhibition moves.

Expectation moves.

Muscular tension moves.

Neural preparation moves.

The possibility of response moves.

Response time measures the interval between stimulus and action.

But inside that interval, there is a world.

Science calls part of this premotor processing.

We can also call it the bodily field of decision before the gesture.

In the post-social-media world, this field is not protected.

It is disputed.

3D is not a visual metaphor

In the 5D Body-Territory model, 3D is not a visual metaphor.

3D means that the external stimulus enters the body-territory and leaves material, functional, and anatomical traces.

In the flanker task, visual stimuli are not merely “images on a screen.”

They enter the body.

They can modify neural activity.

Reorganize attention.

Alter muscular tension.

Prepare the hand.

Activate rule memory.

Generate conflict.

Produce error.

Reduce or increase hesitation.

These traces can be measured or inferred through EEG, LRP, EMG, eye-tracking, video, response time, and performance.

In social media, the same logic expands.

A notification also produces 3D.

A short video too.

An aggressive comment too.

A body comparison too.

An AI-generated answer too.

An infinite feed too.

Each stimulus leaves traces.

And when these traces are repeated thousands of times, they can reorganize attention, expectation, desire, fear, reward, and movement.

APUS and Tekoha in adolescence

APUS is extended proprioception.

It is the body positioning itself before the stimuli it receives.

In the experimental task, APUS appears in response preparation: hand, direction, tension, readiness, waiting, inhibition.

Even before pressing the button, the body is already positioned before the possibility of acting.

In the digital world, APUS appears in the thumb that scrolls, the bent neck, the fixed gaze, the curved posture, the hand that searches for the phone, the tension before opening a message, the body already preparing to check.

Tekoha is extended interoception.

It is territory entering the internal states of the body.

In the adolescent, the same stimulus can enter a rested, anxious, pressured, confident, insecure, hungry, sleepy body — a body afraid of making mistakes or desiring belonging.

This Tekoha modulates the response.

And here APUS and Tekoha feed back into each other.

The body positions itself before the stimulus.

That positioning changes the internal state.

And the internal state changes the next form of positioning.

A notification can alter breathing.

A comparison can change posture.

A comment can contract the body.

A sequence of videos can dissolve lived time.

An algorithm can push the adolescent from Zone 2 into Zone 3.

Zone 2, Zone 3, and social media

Zone 2 is challenge with enough safety.

It is where the adolescent can learn, make mistakes, try, adjust, play, create, train, study, love, belong, and respond better.

Zone 3 is capture.

It is when the field narrows.

The body enters threat.

Attention fixes.

Comparison hurts.

Shame grows.

The response becomes impulsive, repetitive, or frozen.

Social media can offer belonging, expression, connection, and discovery.

But it can also create Zone 3 when it turns the adolescent into a permanent object of comparison, evaluation, intermittent reward, and social surveillance.

The question is not only:

how much screen time?

The question is:

what kind of field does this screen prepare before movement?

Expanded adolescence: the 11–30 hypothesis

Classical adolescence is usually treated as a phase between childhood and adulthood. There is already literature defending that a definition of 10 to 24 years better corresponds to adolescent growth and contemporary social changes than the traditional limit of 10 to 19 years.

But, in the post-social-media and post-AI world, perhaps we need to open an even more radical hypothesis:

adolescence as an expanded field between 11 and 30 years.

Not as a fixed label.

Not as an infantilization of young adults.

But as recognition that autonomy, belonging, identity, body, work, desire, public image, attention, and future are taking longer to stabilize.

Not because DNA has lost intelligence.

But because the territory has changed.

The adolescent body matures inside an ecology that hijacks attention, monetizes comparison, accelerates reward, fragments lived time, and replaces embodied experiences with algorithmic architectures.

The question stops being:

why does the adolescent not mature?

And becomes:

what world are we offering for this maturation to happen?

Qualia and attentional capture

No stimulus enters empty.

An error can carry shame.

A task can carry pressure.

A screen can carry comparison.

A teacher can carry threat.

Training can carry belonging.

A test can carry fear.

A feed can carry desire.

A like can carry relief.

Silence can carry abandonment.

These qualia modulate the premotor field.

They can harmonize attention.

Or hijack it.

When the qualia is trust, the adolescent can experience challenge as a field of growth.

When the qualia is threat, the body can respond too quickly, too late, or in a disorganized way.

That is why response time is not only cognitive speed.

It is bodily history.

It is Tekoha.

It is APUS.

It is 3D.

It is movement.

It is qualia.

And today, it is also platform.

DANA: religare DNA against the capture of adolescence

DANA is religare DNA.

It is a religiosity, a politics, and a society that respects the Weichö — the singular power of world-creation that DNA Intelligence allows in each body-territory.

In adolescence, DANA asks:

are networks, schools, technologies, and policies helping the adolescent create world?

Or are they capturing attention before the adolescent can form their own world?

DANA is not nostalgia against technology.

Nor is it moralism against social media.

It is a deeper question:

who has the right to modulate the premotor field of a generation?

If adolescence is the period in which the body learns to transform stimulus into gesture, desire into choice, conflict into action, and belonging into world, then capturing adolescent attention is capturing the future of their DNA Intelligence.

DANA demands that technology, AI, and social media be redesigned to protect Weichö, not exploit it.

Experimental proposal

From the article by Slawson and colleagues, we could propose a 5D Body-Territory study on adolescence, lived time, and attentional capture.

Question:

how do APUS, Tekoha, 3D, movement, and qualia modulate premotor processing in adolescents exposed to highly capturing digital ecologies?

Possible measures:

• EEG with LRP to separate premotor and motor intervals;

• fNIRS/NIRS to follow cortical hemodynamics during decision;

• EMG for tension and muscular preparation;

• HRV/RMSSD for autonomic regulation;

• GSR for physiological activation;

• eye-tracking for attentional capture;

• video for posture, hesitation, approach, and avoidance;

• behavioral performance;

• phenomenological reports on pressure, trust, fear, comparison, belonging, and desire;

• analysis of digital Capta: time-on-platform, return, interruption, checking pattern, and exposure to intermittent reward.

The question would not be only:

who responds faster?

It would be:

what field is preparing the response before movement?

And further:

does this field help the adolescent mature, or does it capture their world-formation?

Closing

The article by Slawson and colleagues shows that, in adolescence, response-time differences seem to reflect mainly premotor processing, and not only motor execution. With EEG and LRP, the authors were able to separate the interval between stimulus, preparation, and response, showing that the body is already organizing itself before movement appears.

This finding is precious for our time.

Because it shows that lived time begins before the visible gesture.

Before the button, there is field.

Before action, there is preparation.

Before movement, there is a body-territory reorganizing traces.

But, in the post-social-media and post-AI world, this field is not empty.

It is disputed by platforms, metrics, notifications, algorithms, Capta, and monetization models.

Adolescence is not only a phase of delay or impulsivity.

It is a phase in which the body learns to transform stimulus into gesture.

World into response.

Pressure into choice.

Conflict into action.

Belonging into future.

Perhaps we are facing an expanded adolescence, displaced and pressured by new ecologies of capture.

Not because adolescents are weak.

But because the territory has changed too fast.

The question that remains is:

how can we create territories where adolescents can prepare their movements without having their attention hijacked before choice?

This is a scientific question.

Educational.

Clinical.

Political.

Decolonial.

And deeply bodily.

Highlighted reference

Commented article:
Slawson, W., Hajcak, G., McMurray, B., & Bartholow, B. D. (2026).
Age-Related Differences in Response Time Across Adolescence Reflect Premotor, but Not Motor, Processing Speed.
Psychophysiology, 63, e70313.
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.70313.