There is a growing interest in the effects of social engagement on cognition, yet, research on the effects of social engagement with the experimenter in empirical contexts has been sparse. During an experiment, the experimenter and participant form a dyad, establishing a certain level of rapport—a sense of a positive and congruent relationship. This rapport is thought to promote performance by providing a comfortable testing environment, thereby reducing resource demand, and enhancing participant engagement and willingness to exert effort to perform. The current study sought to better understand the role of rapport by examining the effects of perceived rapport on effortful control, that is, inhibition and shifting, in an experimental setting among children with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Forty-nine children (9 to 12 years old) were divided into two groups based on ADHD classification (i.e., typically developing children, n = 27; children with ADHD, n = 22). Participants completed the day/night Stroop task and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task following a short rapport-building conversation with the experimenter. Later, both participant and experimenter filled the CHARM questionnaire reporting the rapport constructed during the experiment. Results show moderating effects of ADHD on the relationship between perceived rapport quality and congruency, and participant’s executive functions performance. Specifically, children with ADHD showed higher susceptibility to rapport quality and were impervious to the effects of rapport congruency. Results highlight the importance of rapport with the experimenter in experimental research and suggest incorporating considerations concerning rapport, both in designing the experimental paradigm as well as an independent factor affecting task performance and outcome.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience a range of social and non-social attention deficits. To date, most studies assessed the neurological framework or discrete behavioral traits related to one attention network, leaving a gap in the understanding of the developmental cascade affecting the inter-relations among attention networks in ASD in a pervasive manner. We propose a theoretical framework that integrates the behavioral deficits and neurological manifestations through a cohesive developmental prism of attention networks’ activations while assessing their impact on social deficits in children with ASD. Insights arising from the model suggest hyper-and-hypoactivation of posterior attention networks leads to an altered prefrontal anterior attention network weight in ways that conjointly impact social performance in ASD. This perspective on how attention networks develop and interact in ASD may inform future research directions regarding ASD and attention development.

IntroductionParents provide their children with their first exposures to reciprocal shared experiences, and parental modeling of socio-emotional behaviors and regulatory responses largely influences their child’s behavioral and neurological development. Some parental reactions are conscious, while others are non-volitional. This project aimed to explore parent-child pupil dilation change responses during shared interactions, specifically, whether parents’ neuro-regulatory responses when sharing experiences with their child are different than responses of children interacting with their parents or children and adult peers sharing with each other.MethodsTo test this, four distinct interacting groups were recruited: (1) Parents sharing with their child; (2) Children sharing with their parent; (3) Children sharing with peers; and (4) Adults sharing with peers. All dyads engaged in a computerized shared imagery task, which facilitates communication and mental imagery during a shared experience. During the task, pupil diameter change was recorded as a measure of regulatory response.ResultsFindings highlight that parents sharing with their child have lower pupil diameter change than children sharing with their parents (p < 0.01), children sharing with peers (p < 0.01), and adults sharing with peers (p < 0.05), While no differences were seen between children sharing with parents, children sharing with peers or adults sharing with peers.DiscussionFindings deepen the understanding of the neuroscience of parenting, by suggesting that parents, even of older children and adolescents, tend to regulate their arousal when interacting with their child, a response that proves to be unique compared to other dyad types for sharing experiences. Considering this dynamic, findings may direct future parent-led intervention methods to improve the child’s socio-emotional development.