Parental Neural Responsivity to Infants’ Attention: How Mature Brains Support Immature Brains During Social Interaction

• In Event: 3-153 - Sustained Attention in Early Development

Integrative Statement

Introduction. This study investigates infant’s attention using both behavioral measurements and EEG recordings in two contexts: Solo play and Joint play. This approach is complementary to Paper 1, which focuses exclusively on the infant-related factors that support Solo SA. Previous research has shown that when an infant and a social partner jointly attend to the same object during naturalistic play, infants’ visual attentiveness towards that object is increased. However, we do not yet understand the mechanisms of how these social influences operate on early attention, moment-to-moment during play.
Method. To examine this, we examined the neural and behavioral dynamics of infants’ and adults’ attention in two contexts (see Figure 1). During Joint Play, each dyad was presented consecutively with toy objects and asked to play together. During Solo Play a 40cm-high divider was placed between the infant and the parent, and two identical toys were presented concurrently to child and parent, who played separately (see Figure 1). Dual EEG was recorded and both partners’ looking behavior was videoed and coded post hoc, frame by frame, at a rate of 30Hz. Time-lagged cross-correlations were used to assess how changes in neural activity preceded or followed changes in attention – both separately for infant and parents, and across the dyad.
Results. Overall, infants showed longer look durations towards the objects during Joint Play (JP) relative to Solo Play (SP), together with shorter periods of inattention – consistent with previous research.
During solo play, fluctuations in infants’ Theta power (3-6Hz) significantly associated with increases in visual attention (Figure 2a; results of cluster-based permutation test: p=.002). The relationship was asymmetric, such that neural activity also forward-predicted subsequent attentional behaviors more than vice versa. This relationship between the infants’ endogenous brain activity and their visual attentiveness was lower during joint play than solo play (Figure 2b; p=n.s.). This suggests that infants’ endogenous neural control over attention is greater during solo play.
Overall, however, infants were more attentive to the objects during joint play. To understand why, we examined the across-dyad relationship between infant attention and adult brain activity. We found that parents’ Theta power closely tracked changes in their infants’ attention during Joint Play (p=.041) but not during parallel Solo Play (p=.n.s.). Further, instances in which parents showed greater neural responsivity were associated with longer sustained attention by infants (linear mixed effects model: p=.01).
Conclusions. Our results suggest that infants’ own endogenous neural control of the focus of their sustained attention is greater during solo play than during joint play. They also suggest that adults show neural responsivity to the behaviors of the child, and that increased parental neural responsivity associates, look-by-look, with increased infant attentiveness. These findings offer new insights into how social influences operate on infant sustained attention in-the-moment. Moreover, they directly relate to Paper 3 which focuses on the long term consequences of these social influences on infant SA.

Authors

• Sam Wass, University of Cambridge
  Presenting Author

• Valdas Noreika, Cambridge University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stanimira Georgieva, Cambridge University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kaili Clackson, Cambridge University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Victoria Leong, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Cambridge University, UK
  Non-Presenting Author