Baby and adult brains ‘sync up’ during play, finds Princeton Baby Lab
Baby and adult brains ‘sync up’ during play, finds Princeton Baby Lab
Baby and adult brains ‘sync up’ during play, finds Princeton Baby Lab
By Liz Fuller-Wright
January 9, 2020
Summary
A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity.
In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact.
"Previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this 'neural synchrony' develops in the first years of life," said Elise Piazza.
Of neural coupling, many of which were conducted in Hasson's lab, involved scanning adults' brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging, in separate sessions, while the adults lay down and watched movies or listened to stories.
To study real-time communication, the researchers needed to create a child-friendly method of recording brain activity simultaneously from baby and adult brains.
The setup allowed the researchers to record the neural coordination between babies and an adult while they played with toys, sang songs and read a book.
When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world - perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.
"We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.
"That is, the adult's brain seemed to predict when the infants would smile, the infants' brains anticipated when the adult would use more 'baby talk,' and both brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to toys. So, when a baby and adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways."
"Infant and adult brains are coupled to the dynamics of natural communication.," by Elise A. Piazza, Liat Hasenfratz, Uri Hasson and Casey Lew-Williams, was published Dec. 17, 2019, in Psychological Science.
Reference
Fuller-Wright, L. (2020, January 9). Baby and adult brains sync up during play, finds Princeton Baby Lab. Accessed January 14, 2020. Retrieved from www.princeton.edu/news/2020/01/09/baby-and-adult-brains-sync-during-play-finds-princeton-baby-lab.