Presence of parent, gender and emotional valence influences preschoolers' PFC processing of video stimuli

Abstract

Due to an unprecedented increase in children's exposure to a wide range of video stimuli, there is a need to understand how they process them. From the tender age of 3, children show distinct activations in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) when presented with children's movies. However, there are multiple factors that can influence child neural response to such screen media, namely, presence of a specific parent, gender differences and emotional valence. Sixty-two preschool children (37 boys) between ages 3 and 4 inclusive and their parents (33 mothers, 29 fathers) were recruited to engage in a joint video attention task involving three 1-min animation video clips that varied in emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) while the children's neural responses were measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found a significant interaction effect between emotional valence and gender. Specifically, girls showed significantly more whole-PFC activity than boys when viewing the video clip with positive emotional valence. Children who engaged in joint-viewing with their fathers also showed significantly stronger PFC activity than with their mothers, regardless of the emotional valence of video. Our findings suggest how, at a PFC level, different factors interact with one another and influence the joint-viewing experience of screen time amongst mother-child and father-child dyads. The educational and applied implications of our findings will be discussed below.

Performance Assessment of Heartbeat Detection Algorithms on Photoplethysmograph and Functional NearInfrared Spectroscopy Signals

“…A dataset of parent–child hyperscanning fNIRS data [ 17 ] was used to evaluate the feasibility of the heart rate estimation on fNIRS data. This dataset has been used to study the synchrony between parents and children during shared video watching and play [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 ]. It was selected among others because: (a) it includes subjects from two age groups: adults and children; and (b) it collects data during two experimental conditions: while the subjects were watching some videos (thus, few MA are expected), and while the subjects were playing (more MA expected).…”

Asymmetric Prefrontal Cortex Activation Associated with Mutual Gaze of Mothers and Children during Shared Play

“…This study is a subset of a larger fNIRS project investigating parent-child dyads, which consists of two tasks. The co-viewing task involves dyads viewing animations together; studies have found that dyadic neural activities are associated with psychological variables including parenting stress, attachment, and gender differences [17,[26][27][28]. The second task is a play activity, where a behavioural paper on the correlation between dyadic emotional availability, past interactions, and parenting stress [29], as well as a technical study on optimising parameters and strategies during the computation of inter-brain synchrony [30] have been published.…”

Brain mechanisms of parenting in co-parenting spouses and parent-child dyads

“…Fathers of sons showed greater PFC activation than mothers of sons when co-viewing the conflict scene from The Incredibles, whereas mothers of daughters showed greater PFC activation than fathers of daughters when viewing the conflict scene. The findings from this chapter have been accepted for publication in Durnford, Balagtas, Azhari et. al (2020).…”

“…On the contrary, partners tend to synchronise to situations that do not elicit distress so as to remain socially attuned to each other's emotional states. In another study, Bizzego et al (2020) examined the degree of physiological synchrony across romantic partners, friends and strangers when each pair was presented with video vignettes which elicited different emotional conditions (i.e., fear, embarrassment, romance, pride, sadness, calmness/neutral). They demonstrated that romantic partners displayed significantly greater synchrony towards the neutral non-social stimulus which depicted a scene of waves rolling onto the beach.…”