Parental neural responsivity to infants’ visual attention: How mature brains influence immature brains during social interaction

Abstract

Almost all attention and learning—in particular, most early learning—take place in social settings. But little is known of how our brains support dynamic social interactions. We recorded dual electroencephalography (EEG) from 12-month-old infants and parents during solo play and joint play. During solo play, fluctuations in infants’ theta power significantly forward-predicted their subsequent attentional behaviours. However, this forward-predictiveness was lower during joint play than solo play, suggesting that infants’ endogenous neural control over attention is greater during solo play. Overall, however, infants were more attentive to the objects during joint play. To understand why, we examined how adult brain activity related to infant attention. We found that parents’ theta power closely tracked and responded to changes in their infants’ attention. Further, instances in which parents showed greater neural responsivity were associated with longer sustained attention by infants. Our results offer new insights into how one partner influences another during social interaction.

Author summary

We are a social species. Most infants and young children spend the majority of their early waking hours in the company of others. However, almost everything that we know about how the brain subserves early attention and learning comes from studies that examined brain function in one individual at a time just because it is easier to do experiments that way. Here, we examine the neural correlates of how attention is shared between two people engaged in social interaction. We recorded brain activity from infants and parents using scalp electroencephalogram during parallel solo play with toys and during joint play. We examined the associations between attention and brain activity in each member of the dyad independently (infant attention–infant brain, parent attention–parent brain), and we also examined cross-dyad associations (infant attention–parent brain). Our findings suggested that infants’ attention is more endogenously controlled during solo play than joint play. They also suggested that parents are neurally responsive to their infants during social play, and that, when the parent is more neurally responsive, the infant is more attentive.