Mother-Infant Face-to-Face Interaction: The Communicative Value of Infant-Directed Talking and Singing

Arias, Diana Jimena; Peña, Marcela

doi:10.1159/000447640

Cited by 10 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…These results were subsequently replicated in 6-month-old infants (Vouloumanos, Martin, & Onishi, 2014). Even with an attention grabbing and highly natural activity such as singing, 6 to 8-month-olds display less communicative behaviors (vocalization, visual contact, body movements and synchrony of these behaviors with maternal interactive behavior) in a face-to-face interaction than with a talking mother (Arias & Pena, 2016) exchanging with ostensive social signals but one speaking and the other "beeping", 6-month-old infants become able to use the "beeps" to identify a "dinosaur" category as opposed to "fish", unlike babies who have heard the same audio file but decorrelated from the social exchanges (Ferguson & Waxman, 2016). This experiment illustrates the three key elements that support pedagogy in human infants: social cognition to figure out the communication medium, the ability to sort objects in categories, and a symbolic system to label any category.…”

Section: Speech An Information Tool On the Worldmentioning

confidence: 73%

Infants’ Early Competence for Language and Symbols

Dehaene‐Lambertz

Flo²,

Pena³

2020

The Social Brain

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Humans have much more sophisticated communication skills than other species. They are not limited to emotional cries, alarm calls and soothing demands, but they interpret the inner and outer world in a symbolic way, resulting in a collective intelligence and an accumulation of knowledge called culture. This culture permeates the child and fosters efficient learning, based on the knowledge accumulated through generations. To develop this collective intelligence, it requires (1) a social brain predisposed to learn from conspecifics, (2) awareness of one's mental state and knowledge, and those of others, (3) a shared common language of though, (4) a communication system for exchanging this information. In this essay, we insist on the value of symbolic representations as a compressed necessary format for representing information to ourselves and exchanging information with others. We propose that human cognition has been boosted beyond the cognition of other primates by the multiplicative advantage of co-development of social cognition, language but also symbolic thinking that can be observed from the first months of life on.

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Section: Speech An Information Tool On the Worldmentioning

confidence: 73%

Infants’ Early Competence for Language and Symbols

Dehaene‐Lambertz

Flo²,

Pena³

2020

The Social Brain

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“…Very little research focused on the neurobiology of attachment from the child's end. Arias and Pena ( 2016 ) found that infants exhibited higher beta- and gamma-band activity to infant-directed speech compared to singing and suggested that episodes of personal, species-typical behavior elicit beta and gamma oscillations in areas of the affiliative brain. A study assessing brain-to-brain synchronization between infants and mothers while viewing a video of mother singing showed that maternal singing had a direct causal effect on the infant's oscillatory patterns in the theta and alpha bands.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Child brain exhibits a multi-rhythmic response to attachment cues

Pratt

Goldstein

Feldman

2018

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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Research on the human parental brain implicated brain networks involved in simulation, mentalization and emotion processing and indicated that stimuli of own parent–child interaction elicit greater integration among networks supporting attachment. Here, we examined children’s neural activation while viewing own parent–child interactions and asked whether similar networks activate when children are exposed to attachment stimuli. Sixty-five 11-year-old children underwent magnetoencephalography (MEG) while observing own vs unfamiliar mother-child interaction. Own mother–child interactions elicited a greater neural response across distributed brain areas including alpha suppression in posterior regions, theta enhancement in the fusiform gyrus and beta- and gamma-band oscillations across a wide cluster in the right temporal cortex, comprising the superior temporal sulcus/superior temporal gyrus and insula. Theta and gamma activations were associated with the degree of mother–child social synchrony in the home ecology. Findings from this exploratory study are the first to show activations in children that are similar to previous findings in parents and comparable associations between social synchrony and gamma oscillations in temporal regions. Results indicate that attachment stimuli elicit a strong neural response in children that spreads across a wide range of oscillations, underscoring the considerable neural resources allocated to this fundamental, survival-related cue.

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“…To ensure that asymmetry differences were not driven by a specific trial type (especially given that positive trials contained both infant-directed talking and infant-directed singing, which have been shown to elicit differing behavioral patterns in infants, see Arias and Peña, 2016) F(2,18) = 3.97, ƞ p 2 = .31, p = .037, observed power = .64,…”

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confidence: 99%

Affective Cortical Asymmetry at the Early Developmental Emergence of Emotional Expression

Bolinger

Ngo

Kock

et al. 2020

eNeuro

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Emotions have an important survival function. Vast amounts of research have demonstrated how affect-related changes in physiology promote survival by effecting short and long-term changes in adaptive behavior. However, if emotions truly serve such an inherent function, they should be pervasive across species and be established early in life. Here, using electroencephalographic (EEG) brain activity we sought to characterize core neurophysiological features underlying affective function at the emergence of emotional expression, i.e., at the developmental age when human infants start to show reliable stimulus-elicited emotional states (4-6 months). Using an approach which eschews traditional EEG frequency band delineations (like theta, alpha), we demonstrate that negative emotional states induce a strong right hemispheric increase in the prominence of the resonant frequency (~5-6 Hz) in the infant frontal EEG. Increased rightward asymmetry was strongly correlated with increased heart rate responses to emotionally negative compared to neutral states. We conclude that functional frontal asymmetry is a key component of emotional processing and suggest that the rightward asymmetry in prominence of the resonant frequency during negative emotional states might reflect functional asymmetry in the central representation of anatomically-driven asymmetry in the autonomic nervous system. Our findings indicate that the specific mode hallmarking emotional processing in the frontal cortex is established in parallel with the emergence of stable emotional states very early during development, despite the well-known protracted maturation of frontal cortex. 3 Significance Statement Emotions provide an important survival function and are associated with unique brain states that should theoretically be present early in life. In this paper, we demonstrate in 4-6 month infants (i.e. when infants first reliably express emotions) that negative emotions are linked to increased prominence in the resonant EEG frequency of the right compared to left frontal cortex. The extent of this asymmetry was linked to heart rate reactivity. These results show that emotion induces asymmetric patterns in brain activity at the emergence of emotional expression, possibly laying the foundation for more complex functional asymmetries observed later in life.

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Mother-Infant Face-to-Face Interaction: The Communicative Value of Infant-Directed Talking and Singing

Cited by 10 publications

References 47 publications

Infants’ Early Competence for Language and Symbols

Infants’ Early Competence for Language and Symbols

Child brain exhibits a multi-rhythmic response to attachment cues

Affective Cortical Asymmetry at the Early Developmental Emergence of Emotional Expression

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