Infant and adult brains are coupled to the dynamics of natural communication

Abstract

Infancy is the foundational period for learning from adults, and the dynamics of the social environment have long been proposed as central to children's development. Here we reveal a novel, highly naturalistic approach for studying live interactions between infants and adults. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we simultaneously and continuously measured the brains of infants (9-15 months) and an adult while they communicated and played with each other in real time. We found that time-locked neural coupling within dyads was significantly greater when they interacted with each other than with control individuals. In addition, we found that both infant and adult brains continuously tracked the moment-to-moment fluctuations of mutual gaze, infant emotion, and adult speech prosody with high temporal precision. This investigation advances what is currently known about how the brains and behaviors of infants both shape and reflect those of adults during real-life communication.

Proximity and Touch are associated with Neural but not Physiological Synchrony in Naturalistic Mother-Infant Interactions

“…As hypothesized, INS in mother-infant dyads occurred predominantly in lateral and medial frontal areas and the results thus replicate earlier adult-infant as well as adult-children fNIRS hyperscanning studies (Nguyen, Schleihauf, et al, 2020a;Piazza et al, 2020;Reindl et al, 2018). INS in frontal areas has been related to the "mutual social attention system" of interacting partners (Gvirts & Perlmutter, 2020).…”

“…INS has been mainly identified in frontal and temporal brain regions associated with socio-cognitive processes (Gvirts & Perlmutter, 2020;Redcay & Schilbach, 2019), including mutual attention (prefrontal cortex), affect sharing (inferior frontal gyrus), mutual prediction, mentalizing and shared intentions (temporo-parietal junction). Additionally, high interaction quality, marked by joint attention, infant positive affect and/or turn-taking, is associated with increased interpersonal neural synchrony (Nguyen, Schleihauf, et al, 2020a;Piazza, Hasenfratz, Hasson, & Lew-Williams, 2020;Reindl, Gerloff, Scharke, & Konrad, 2018), suggesting that INS could be a sensitive biomarker for successful mutual attunement between caregivers and their infants. However, the role of touch in establishing caregiver-infant INS has been neglected so far.…”

Measuring shared responses across subjects using intersubject correlation

“…By using interspecies functional correlation analysis in conjunction with a naturalistic visual stimulus, Mantini et al (2012) were able to identify functional homologies across primate species without assuming anatomical correspondence. The same logic can be used to compare neural entrainment to a naturalistic stimulus across populations, such as between autistic patients and controls (Hasson et al, 2009; Salmi et al , 2013) or over the course of development (Cantlon and Li, 2013; Campbell et al, 2015; Petroni et al, 2018; Piazza et al, 2018).…”

Measuring shared responses across subjects using intersubject correlation

“…By using interspecies functional correlation analysis in conjunction with a naturalistic visual stimulus, Mantini and colleagues (2012) were able to identify functional homologies across primate species without assuming anatomical correspondence. The same logic can be used to compare neural entrainment to a naturalistic stimulus across populations, such as between autistic patients and controls (Hasson et al, 2009;Salmi et al, 2014) or over the course of development (Cantlon and Li, 2013;Campbell et al, 2015;Petroni et al, 2018;Piazza et al, 2018).…”