Good mothers are on the same wavelength as their babies… literally: Brain scans reveals toddlers learn better if parents ‘sync up with them’ by smiling and maintaining eye contact
- Mothers and babies’ brain activity sync up when the child is actively learning
- Babies responded to social signals from the mother like eye contact and smiling
- These affected child’s responses to objects and impacted their brain pattern
- Studies of brain patterns in concert tell us about how our brains learn socially
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Mothers engaged with their babies may find that their brain waves get in sync too, experts say.
And it may be helping the child learn faster, say scientists.
Interactions between a mother and child that cause their brain activity to follow the same patterns ‘neural synchrony’, can be triggered by social signals such as eye contact.
A mother smiling or frowning at an object to express like or dislike also influenced the baby’s brain activity and response to the toy.
Researchers found this mirroring of brain wave patterns was a good predictor of how well babies’ learnt about their environment.
The latest findings could be provide insight into social bonding, developmental disorders, including how to improve early years learning.
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Mothers connected with their babies may find that even their brain waves are in sync. Interaction between mother and child that leads to the child learning about their social environment caused their brain waves to follow the same pattern (stock image)
The study was discussed at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s (CNS) annual meeting in San Francisco.
A study looking at brain activity of both babies and their mothers while wearing wireless EEG headsets during active play were presented.
Researchers found that how well babies’ neural activity matched with their mothers’ was a good indicator of how well they learned about new toys.
Social brains interact like a dance where partners take their own steps but move in concert, continuously adjusting and adapting, said Dr Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College, who is chairing a symposium on the topic at CNS.
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During each experiments, the headsets worn by the mother and child tracked their brain activity as the pair played with toys.
Dr Victoria Leong of the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said: ‘We found that stronger neural synchrony predicted a higher likelihood of social learning by the infant.’
Infants would watch their mother, who showed either a positive or a negative emotion towards a toy.
These cues could be smiling or frowning at the toy and expressing like or dislike by saying out loud: ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like this’ about the object.
These emotional responses affected their infants’ decisions to interact with the toys and their brainwave activities as a result.
The researchers found that social signals like eye contact with the baby were associated with increased synchrony in the pair’s brain patterns as well as better learning for the baby.
Exactly what leads to the neural synchrony, however, is still unknown.
Researchers from Cambridge found how well babies’ neural activity syncs with their mothers’ during toy playing predicts how well they learn about new toys. Neural synchrony is when brainwaves from two people follow predictable patterns with respect to each other (stock image)
Dr Leong said: ‘When we connect neurally with others, we are opening ourselves to receiving information and influence from others.’
‘There is no substitute for being physically present and in the moment to connect with an infant.’
Dr Leong added that the work has wide significance for classroom learning, social bonding, and developmental disorders.
‘I am interested in understanding what happens when parents or children fail to synchronize with each other, which may occur in certain mental health difficulties and developmental disorders, and the impact that this might have on learning and development in the longer term.’
HOW DO BABIES LEARN?
Babies have the ability to see faces and objects of different shapes, sizes, and colors. They can tell the difference between the voices of their parents and others.
Even before a baby is born, the process of learning language has already begun.
In the third trimester of pregnancy, when the infant’s ears are sufficiently developed, the intonation patterns of the mother’s speech are transmitted through the fluids in the womb.
This is thought to be like listening to someone talking in a swimming pool: It’s difficult to make out the individual sounds, but the rhythm and intonation are clear. This has an important effect on language learning.
By the time an infant is born, she already has a preference for her mother’s language. At this stage the infant is able to identify language through its intonation patterns.
The latest findings is part of the newer research into the social side of the brain that is shedding light on how our brains acts in concert with others’.
Dr Wheatley said: ‘There’s this huge gap in knowledge about how our brains work in concert with other minds.’
‘We’re this massively social species and yet the field of neuroscience has focused on the brain in isolation.’
Classical neuroimaging studies using the likes of MRI scans tend to put people isolated brain scanning machines that bear no significance to the real world.
Dr Wheatley is working to come up with new methods to understand how brains behave in a social context including scenarios that allow people in fMRI scanners to talk to each other at the same time across different sites.
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