A new investigation, titled 'Neural response of parents to babies' visual attention: how mature brains influence immature brains during social interaction', reveals for the first time that When mothers participate in joint games with their baby, their brains show similar bursts of activity. You may ask, what about the parents? The same may happen, but it has not yet been studied.
The study, conducted by the University of East London, has been published in PLOS Biology and reveals important facts about the interrelation between babies and their parents during the game.
The mother's brain activity echoes that of the baby
Almost all attention and learning (especially early learning) takes place in social settings. But little is known about how our brains support dynamic social interactions.
To learn something else, the researchers explain that they recorded dual electroencephalography (EEG) of 12-month-old children and their mothers during solo play and group play.
When babies play with objects, their first attempts to pay attention to things are accompanied by explosions of high frequency activity in their brain.
In Babies and more Play with your children, the best Christmas gift: seven reasons why children need to play with their parentsDuring solo play, fluctuations in babies' brains significantly predicted their subsequent behavior. However, in general, babies were more attentive to objects during the joint game.
To understand why, they examined how adult brain activity was related to child care. They found that mothers' brain activity also responded to changes in their children's attention.
In addition, cases in which mothers showed a greater neural response were associated with longer sustained attention by infants.
The findings suggest that, When a baby pays attention to things, the mother's brain tracks and responds to her baby's behavior, as if the actions of their babies were reflected in their brain activity.
There are still questions to study
The researchers say that "The results offer new perspectives on how one partner influences another during social interaction." But according to the study's lead author, Vicky Leong, the results raise a lot of more unknowns:
"We don't know, for example, if some parents respond more to their babies than others, and if so, why. And our study only looked at mothers, so we don't know if mothers and fathers can be different in the way they respond neurally to their babies. "
And he ends by ensuring that although his findings are exciting "There is much more to investigate about how, exactly, this type of parental neuronal responsiveness can help young children learn."
