Eye Contact With Your Baby Helps Synchronize Brainwaves Making eye contact with an infant makes adul

Eye Contact With Your Baby Helps Synchronize Brainwaves Making eye contact with an infant makes adults’ and babies’ brainwaves ‘get in sync’ with each other – which is likely to support communication and learning – according to researchers at the University of Cambridge.When a parent and infant interact, various aspects of their behaviour can synchronise, including their gaze, emotions and heartrate, but little is known about whether their brain activity also synchronises – and what the consequences of this might be.Brainwaves reflect the group-level activity of millions of neurons and are involved in information transfer between brain regions. Previous studies have shown that when two adults are talking to each other, communication is more successful if their brainwaves are in synchrony.Researchers at the Baby-LINC Lab at the University of Cambridge carried out a study to explore whether infants can synchronise their brainwaves to adults too – and whether eye contact might influence this. Their results are published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Original Research: Full open access research for “Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains” by Victoria Leong, Elizabeth Byrne, Kaili Clackson, Stanimira Georgieva, Sarah Lam, and Sam Wass in PNAS. Published online November 28 2017 doi:10.1073/pnas.1702493114 As anticipated, the researchers found that infants’ brainwaves were more synchronised to the adults’ when the adult’s gaze met the infant’s, as compared to when her gaze was averted. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to the researchers. -- source link

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