Adolescent attention to parents and friends: Evidence of social reorientation in early social information processing.

During adolescence, peer relationships become highly salient as teens are increasingly motivated to achieve independence from their parents. This social reorientation is thought to be potentiated by puberty, but social factors (like teens' closeness to their parent and friend) may also influence the motivational salience of peers. To date, little is known about the biological or social factors that are associated with the heightened salience of peers (compared to parents) during adolescence, resulting in a large gap in our understanding of teenagers' socioemotional development. To examine this, we compared 11-15-year-olds' overt and covert attention toward their parent and friend (an index of salience in early social information processing stages) and probed whether these varied as a function of adolescents' pubertal status and/or relative emotional closeness to each person. Participants (N = 85, Mage = 13.2, 62% female) completed a dot-probe task, featuring images of their parent and friend, while their attentional patterns were recorded via eye movements and response time. Questionnaires were used to estimate adolescents' pubertal status and their relative closeness to parents versus friends. Linear mixed-effects models revealed that adolescents attended to their friends more than to their parents (in terms of looking time; p < .001); however, that attentional bias was accentuated in teens who reported being closer to their friend than to their parent (p = .003). Pubertal status was not associated with attentional biases. Findings indicate that adolescents' friends generally outcompete their parents for attention, but that emotional closeness to each person moderates the relative salience of peers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).