Advances in Understanding Maternal Memory Processes from Pregnancy to Postpartum: Risk-Buffering, ‘Baby-Brain,’ and Ecological Approaches

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Caregiving is one of the most complex and cognitively-loading roles humans take, dealing with daily child-rearing tasks and challenges. Short- and long-term memory processes may be critical in supporting adaptive caregiving, as these demands require maintaining and monitoring caregiving-relevant information, encoding into long-term memory, and using this information to guide and regulate caregiving behavior. Concurrently, women commonly report experiencing memory declines, or ‘baby brain,’ as they transition to motherhood, potentially counteracting the increased importance of memory for caregiving. This international symposium explores maternal memory from multiple perspectives. The first paper focuses on the risk-buffering effect of maternal working memory, examining its role in post-traumatic stress symptoms among Israeli mothers and children exposed to war-related threat. The second paper challenges the baby brain hypothesis by comparing memory performance of Australian mothers at one-year postpartum and nulliparous women, distinguishing between objective and subjective memory, and taking sleep and wellbeing into account. The third paper further challenges the baby brain hypothesis by examining plasticity in learning and long-term memory of caregiving-relevant versus non-relevant information among American pregnant and nulliparous women, emphasizing the importance of ecological assessment of memory in the caregiving context. The fourth paper extends on this notion by integrating event segmentation theory and parental mentalizing and sensitivity to develop a new measure based on segmentation of infant videos. Together, this symposium addresses the importance of memory for caregiving, refines our understanding of the impact of motherhood on memory, and advances the conceptualization and measurement of cognition within the context of caregiving.

Sub Unit

• Attention, Learning, Memory

Chairs

• Tal Yatziv, Yale University

• Naama Atzaba-Poria, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Individual Presentations

• Maternal and Child Post-traumatic Stress Symptoms in Armed-Conflict Zones: The Role of Maternal Working Memory - Presenting Author: Michal Levy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Tal Yatziv, Yale University; Kinneret Levavi, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Porat Yakov, Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Alison Pike, University of Sussex; Kirby Deater-Deckard, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Amnon Hadar, Clalit Health Services; Guy Bar, Soroka University Medical Center and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Miron Froimovici, Clalit Health Services; Naama Atzaba-Poria, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

• Evidence of subjective, but not objective, cognitive deficit in new mothers at 1-year postpartum - Presenting Author: Edwina R Orchard, Yale University; Phillip GD Ward, Monash University; Gary F Egan, Monash University; Sharna D Jamadar, Monash University

• Evidence for cognitive plasticity during pregnancy via enhanced learning and memory - Presenting Author: Bridget Callaghan, The University of California, Los Angeles; Clare McCormack; Nim Tottenham, Columbia University; Catherine Monk, Columbia University Irving Medical Center

• Ecological Assessment of Working Memory Updating in the Context of Parental Mentalizing via Event Segmentation - Presenting Author: Tal Yatziv, Yale University; Michal Levy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Naama Atzaba-Poria, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Yoav Kessler, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev