Species-specific response to human infant faces in the premotor cortex

Abstract

The human infant face represents an essential source of communicative signals on the basis of which adults modulate their interactions with infants. Behavioral studies demonstrate that infants faces activate sensitive and attuned responses in adults through their gaze, face expression, voice, and gesture. In this study we aimed to identify brain responses that underlie adults’ general propensity to respond to infant faces. We recorded fMRI during adults’ (non-parents) processing of unfamiliar infant faces compared to carefully matched adult faces and infrahuman mammal infant and adult faces. Human infant faces activated several brain systems including the lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor area, cingulate cortex, anterior insula and the thalamus. Activation of these brain circuits suggests adults’ preparation for communicative behavior with infants as well as attachment and caregiving. The same brain regions preferentially responded to human infant faces when compared to animal infant faces, indicating species-specific adult brain responses. Moreover, results of support vector machine based classification analysis indicated that these regions allowed above chance-level prediction of brain state during perception of human infant faces. The complex of brain responses to human infant faces appear to include biological mechanisms that underlie responsiveness and a caring inclination toward young children which appear to transcend adult’s biological relationship to the baby.

The neural basis of responsive caregiving behaviour: Investigating temporal dynamics within the parental brain

“…Broadly, fMRI studies have demonstrated motor and supplementary motor cortex reactivity to infant facial and vocal cues (see Table 1). This has led some authors to suggest that this reactivity indicates a preparatory motor response [99], initiated by biologically salient stimuli [100]. In line with this proposal, using MEG, we also observed early differential responding, occurring at around 180 ms to infant vocalisations, localized to motor cortex [96].…”

Childhood social inequalities influences neural processes in young adult caregiving

“…The posterior insula is connected with the somatosensory cortex (Uddin, 2015) as well as the thalamus and striatum (Singer, Critchley, & Preuschoff, 2009), and thus plays an important role in the integration of sensorimotor information. The supplementary motor cortex also emerges in a human maternal brain study of child feedback brain responses that correlated with a measure of empathic concern (Ho et al, 2014) as well as other studies of non-parents using infant pictures (Caria et al, 2012). Other regions identified in the current study, including the striatum and premotor cortex, are involved in sensorimotor information, and the calcarine sulcus, parahippocampus and fusiform gyrus are heavily involved in visual information processing.…”

Adults with siblings like children’s faces more than those without

“…This effect of baby schema extends to own-race child faces (Glocker, et al, 2009; Lobmaier, et al, 2010), other-race human infant faces with which adults are not familiar (Volk, 2009), as well as faces of other species such as kittens, puppies and monkeys (Brosch, Sander, & Scherer, 2007; Koda, Sato, & Kato, 2013). There is also evidence for species-specificity as the human brain responds more strongly to human baby faces than other animal infants (Caria, et al, 2012). This effect even extends to young children at the age of 3–6 years old.…”