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. 2024 Mar;59(6):1386-1403.
doi: 10.1111/ejn.16233. Epub 2023 Dec 28.

Investigating mother-child inter-brain synchrony in a naturalistic paradigm: A functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning study

Efstratia Papoutselou  1   2 , Samantha Harrison  1   2 , Guangting Mai  1   2 , Bryony Buck  3 , Nikita Patil  2   4 , Ian Wiggins  1   2 , Douglas Hartley  1   2   5
Affiliations

Investigating mother-child inter-brain synchrony in a naturalistic paradigm: A functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning study

Efstratia Papoutselou et al. Eur J Neurosci. 2024 Mar.

Abstract

Successful social interactions between mothers and children are hypothesised to play a significant role in a child's social, cognitive and language development. Earlier research has confirmed, through structured experimental paradigms, that these interactions could be underpinned by coordinated neural activity. Nevertheless, the extent of neural synchrony during real-life, ecologically valid interactions between mothers and their children remains largely unexplored. In this study, we investigated mother-child inter-brain synchrony using a naturalistic free-play paradigm. We also examined the relationship between neural synchrony, verbal communication patterns and personality traits to further understand the underpinnings of brain synchrony. Twelve children aged between 3 and 5 years old and their mothers participated in this study. Neural synchrony in mother-child dyads were measured bilaterally over frontal and temporal areas using functional Near Infra-red Spectroscopy (fNIRS) whilst the dyads were asked to play with child-friendly toys together (interactive condition) and separately (independent condition). Communication patterns were captured via video recordings and conversational turns were coded. Compared to the independent condition, mother-child dyads showed increased neural synchrony in the interactive condition across the prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junction. There was no significant relationship found between neural synchrony and turn-taking and between neural synchrony and the personality traits of each member of the dyad. Overall, we demonstrate the feasibility of measuring inter-brain synchrony between mothers and children in a naturalistic environment. These findings can inform future study designs to assess inter-brain synchrony between parents and pre-lingual children and/or children with communication needs.

Keywords: communication behaviours; cooperation; development; mother–child pair; neural synchrony; social interaction.

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