Posts tagged infants
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Babies can learn their first lullabies in the womb
An infant can recognise a lullaby heard in the womb for several months after birth, potentially supporting later speech development. This is indicated in a new study at the University of Helsinki.
The study focused on 24 women during the final trimester of their pregnancies. Half of the women played the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to their fetuses five days a week for the final stages of their pregnancies. The brains of the babies who heard the melody in utero reacted more strongly to the familiar melody both immediately and four months after birth when compared with the control group. These results show that fetuses can recognise and remember sounds from the outside world.
This is significant for the early rehabilitation, since rehabilitation aims at long-term changes in the brain.
“Even though our earlier research indicated that fetuses could learn minor details of speech, we did not know how long they could retain the information. These results show that babies are capable of learning at a very young age, and that the effects of the learning remain apparent in the brain for a long time,” expounds Eino Partanen, who is currently finishing his dissertation at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit.
“This is the first study to track how long fetal memories remain in the brain. The results are significant, as studying the responses in the brain let us focus on the foundations of fetal memory. The early mechanisms of memory are currently unknown,” points out Dr Minna Huotilainen, principal investigator.
The researchers believe that song and speech are most beneficial for the fetus in terms of speech development. According to the current understanding, the processing of singing and speech in the babies brains are partly based on shared mechanisms, and so hearing a song can support a baby’s speech development. However, little is known about the possible detrimental effects that noise in the workplace can cause to a fetus during the final trimester. An extensive research project on this topic is underway at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health.
Baby brains are tuned to the specific actions of others
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery for adults, but for babies it’s their foremost tool for learning. As renowned people-watchers, babies often observe others demonstrate how to do things and then copy those body movements. It’s how little ones know, usually without explicit instructions, to hold a toy phone to the ear or guide a spoon to the mouth.
Now researchers from the University of Washington and Temple University have found the first evidence revealing a key aspect of the brain processing that occurs in babies to allow this learning by observation.
The findings, published online Oct. 30 by PLOS ONE, are the first to show that babies’ brains showed specific activation patterns when an adult performed a task with different parts of her body. When 14-month-old babies simply watched an adult use her hand to touch a toy, the hand area of the baby’s brain lit up. When another group of infants watched an adult touch the toy using only her foot, the foot area of the baby’s brain showed more activity.
"Babies are exquisitely careful people-watchers, and they’re primed to learn from others," said Andrew Meltzoff, co-author and co-director of the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. "And now we see that when babies watch someone else, it activates their own brains. This study is a first step in understanding the neuroscience of how babies learn through imitation."
The study took advantage of how the brain is organized. The sensory and motor area of the cortex, the outer portion of the brain known for its creased appearance, is arranged by body part with each area of the body represented in identifiable neural real estate. Prick your finger, stick out your tongue, or kick a ball and distinct areas of the brain light up according to a somatotopic map.
Other studies show that adults show this somatotopic brain activation while watching someone else use different body parts, suggesting that adults understand the actions of others in relation to their own bodies. The researchers wondered whether the same would be true in babies.
The 70 infants in the study wore electroencephalogram, or EEG, caps with embedded sensors that detected brain activity in the regions of the cortex that respond to movement or touch of the feet and hands. Sitting on a parent’s lap, each baby watched as an experimenter touched a toy placed on a low table between the baby and the experimenter.
The toy had a clear plastic dome and was mounted on a sturdy base. When the experimenter pressed the dome with her hand or foot, music played and confetti in the dome spun. The experimenter repeated the action – taking breaks after every four presses – until the baby lost interest.
"Our findings show that when babies see others produce actions with a particular body part, their brains are activated in a corresponding way," said Joni Saby, lead author and a psychology graduate student at Temple University in Philadelphia. "This mapping may facilitate imitation and could play a role in the baby’s ability to then produce the same actions themselves."
One of the basics for babies to learn is how to copy what they see adults do. In other words, they must first know that it is indeed their hand and not their foot, mouth or other body part that is needed.
The new study shows that babies’ brains are organized in a somatotopic way that helps crack the interpersonal code. The connection between doing and seeing actions maps hand to hand, foot to foot, all before they can name those body parts through language.
"The reason this is exciting is that it gives insight into a crucial aspect of imitation," said co-author Peter Marshall, an associate psychology professor at Temple University. "To imitate the action of another person, babies first need to register what body part the other person used. Our findings suggest that babies do this in a particular way by mapping the actions of the other person onto their own body."
Meltzoff added, “The neural system of babies directly connects them to other people, which jump-starts imitation and social-emotional connectedness and bonding. Babies look at you and see themselves.”
Research Finds Pain In Infancy Alters Response To Stress, Anxiety Later In Life
Early life pain alters neural circuits in the brain that regulate stress, suggesting pain experienced by infants who often do not receive analgesics while undergoing tests and treatment in neonatal intensive care may permanently alter future responses to anxiety, stress and pain in adulthood, a research team led by Dr. Anne Murphy, associate director of the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University, has discovered.
An estimated 12 percent of live births in the U.S. are considered premature, researchers said. These infants often spend an average of 25 days in neonatal intensive care, where they endure 10-to-18 painful and inflammatory procedures each day, including insertion of feeding tubes and intravenous lines, intubation and repeated heel lance. Despite evidence that pain and stress circuitry in the brain are established and functional in preterm infants, about 65 percent of these procedures are performed without benefit of analgesia. Some clinical studies suggest early life pain has an immediate and long-term impact on responses to stress- and anxiety-provoking events.
The Georgia State study examined whether a single painful inflammatory procedure performed on male and female rat pups on the day of birth alters specific brain receptors that affect behavioral sensitivity to stress, anxiety and pain in adulthood. The findings demonstrated that such an experience is associated with site-specific changes in the brain that regulate how the pups responded to stressful situations. Alterations in how these receptors function have also been associated with mood disorders.
The study findings mirror what is now being reported clinically. Children who experienced unresolved pain following birth show reduced responsiveness to pain and stress.
“While a dampened response to painful and stressful situations may seem advantageous at first, the ability to respond appropriately to a potentially harmful stimulus is necessary in the long term,” Dr. Murphy said.
“The fact that less than 35 percent of infants undergoing painful and invasive procedures receive any sort of pre- or post-operative pain relief needs to be re-evaluated in order to reduce physical and mental health complications associated with preterm birth.”
Baby’s Innate Number Sense Predicts Future Math Skill
Innate ability to identify quantities previews future mathematics performance
Babies who are good at telling the difference between large and small groups of items even before learning how to count are more likely to do better with numbers in the future, according to new research from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
The use of Arabic numerals to represent different values is a characteristic unique to humans, not seen outside our species. But we aren’t born with this skill. Infants don’t have the words to count to 10. So, scientists have hypothesized that the rudimentary sense of numbers in infants is the foundation for higher-level math understanding.
A new study, appearing online in the Oct. 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that children do, in fact, tap into this innate numerical ability when learning symbolic mathematical systems. The Duke researchers found that the strength of an infant’s inborn number sense can be predictive of the child’s future mathematical abilities.
"When children are acquiring the symbolic system for representing numbers and learning about math in school, they’re tapping into this primitive number sense," said Elizabeth Brannon, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience, who led the study. "It’s the conceptual building block upon which mathematical ability is built."
Brannon explained that babies come into the world with a rudimentary understanding referred to as a primitive number sense. When looking at two collections of objects, primitive number sense allows them to identify which set is numerically larger even without verbal counting or using Arabic numerals. For example, a person instinctively knows a group of 15 strawberries is more than six oranges, just by glancing.
Understanding how infants and young children conceptualize and understand number can lead to the development of new mathematics education strategies, said Brannon’s colleague, Duke psychology and neuroscience graduate student Ariel Starr. In particular, this knowledge can be used to design interventions for young children who have trouble learning mathematics symbols and basic methodologies.
To test for primitive number sense, Brannon and Starr analyzed 48 6-month-old infants to see whether they could recognize numerical changes, capitalizing on the interest most babies show in things that change. They placed each baby in front of two screens, one that always showed the same number of dots (e.g., eight), changing in size and position, and another that switched between two different numerical values (e.g., eight and 16 dots). All the arrays of dots changed frequently in size and position. In this task, babies that could tell the difference between the two numerical values (e.g., eight and 16) looked longer at the numerically changing screen.
Brannon and Starr then tested the same children at 3.5 years of age with a non-symbolic number comparison game. The children were shown two different arrays and asked to choose which one had more dots without counting them. In addition, the children took a standardized math test scaled for pre-schoolers, as well as a standardized IQ test. Finally, the researchers gave the children a simple verbal task to identify the largest number word each child could concretely understand.
"We found that infants with higher preference scores for looking at the numerically changing screen had better primitive number sense three years later compared to those infants with lower scores," Starr said. "Likewise, children with higher scores in infancy performed better on standardized math tests."
Brannon said the findings point to a real connection between symbolic math and quantitative abilities that are present in infancy before education takes hold and shapes our mathematical abilities.
"Our study shows that infant number sense is a predictor of symbolic math," Brannon said. "We believe that when children learn the meaning of number words and symbols, they’re likely mapping those meanings onto pre-verbal representations of number that they already have in infancy," she said.
"We can’t measure a baby’s number sense ability at 6 months and know how they’ll do on their SATs," Brannon added. "In fact our infant task only explains a small percentage of the variance in young children"s math performance. But our findings suggest that there is cognitive overlap between primitive number sense and symbolic math. These are fundamental building blocks."
(Source: today.duke.edu)
Cry analyzer seeks clues to babies’ health
Researchers at Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital have developed a new tool that analyzes the cries of babies, searching for clues to potential health or developmental problems. Slight variations in cries, mostly imperceptible to the human ear, can be a “window into the brain” that could allow for early intervention.
To parents, a baby’s cry is a signal of hunger, pain, or discomfort. But to scientists, subtle acoustic features of a cry, many of them imperceptible to the human ear, can hold important information about a baby’s health.
A team of researchers from Brown University and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island has developed a new computer-based tool to perform finely tuned acoustic analyses of babies’ cries. The team hopes their baby cry analyzer will lead to new ways for researchers and clinicians to use cry in identifying children with neurological problems or developmental disorders.
“There are lots of conditions that might manifest in differences in cry acoustics,” said Stephen Sheinkopf, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown, who helped develop the new tool. “For instance, babies with birth trauma or brain injury as a result of complications in pregnancy or birth or babies who are extremely premature can have ongoing medical effects. Cry analysis can be a noninvasive way to get a measurement of these disruptions in the neurobiological and neurobehavioral systems in very young babies.”
The new analyzer is the result of a two-year collaboration between faculty in Brown’s School of Engineering and hospital-based faculty at Women & Infants Hospital. A paper describing the tool is in press in the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
The system operates in two phases. During the first phase, the analyzer separates recorded cries into 12.5-millisecond frames. Each frame is analyzed for several parameters, including frequency characteristics, voicing, and acoustic volume. The second phase uses data from the first to give a broader view of the cry and reduces the number of parameters to those that are most useful. The frames are put back together and characterized either as an utterance — a single “wah” — or silence, the pause between utterances. Longer utterances are separated from shorter ones and the time between utterances is recorded. Pitch, including the contour of pitch over time, and other variables can then be averaged across each utterance.
In the end, the system evaluates for 80 different parameters, each of which could hold clues about a baby’s health.
“It’s a comprehensive tool for getting as much important stuff out of a baby cry that we can,” said Harvey Silverman, professor of engineering and director of Brown’s Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine Systems.
To understand what important stuff to look for, Silverman and his graduate students Brian Reggiannini and Xiaoxue Li worked closely with Sheinkopf and Barry Lester, director of Brown’s Center for the Study of Children at Risk.
“We looked at them as the experts about the kinds of signals we might want to get,” Silverman said, “and we engineers were the experts on what we might actually be able to implement and methods to do so. So working together worked quite well.”
Lester, who has studied baby cries for years, says this vein of research goes back to the 1960s and a disorder called Cri du chat syndrome.
Cri du chat (cry of the cat) is caused by a genetic anomaly similar to Down syndrome. Babies who have it have a distinct, high-pitched cry. While the Cri du chat is unmistakable even without sensitive machinery, Lester and others wondered whether subtler differences in cry could also be indicators of a child’s health.
“The idea is that cry can be a window into the brain,” Lester said.
If neurological deficits change the way babies are able to control their vocal chords, those tiny differences might manifest themselves in differences in pitch and other acoustic features. Lester has published several papers showing that differences in cry are linked to medical problems stemming from malnutrition, prenatal drug exposure, and other risks.
“Cry is an early warning sign that can be used in the context of looking at the whole baby,” Lester said.
The tools used in those early studies, however, are primitive by today’s standards, Lester said. In early work, recorded cries were converted to spectrograms, visual readouts of pitch changes over time. Research technicians then read and coded each spectrogram by hand. Later systems automated the process somewhat, but the research was still slow and cumbersome.
This new automated analyzer enables researchers to evaluate cries much more quickly and in much greater detail. The Brown team plans to make it available to researchers around the world in the hopes of developing new avenues of cry research.
Sheinkopf, who specializes in developmental disorders, plans to use the tool to look for cry features that might correlate with autism.
“We’ve known for a long time that older individuals with autism produce sounds or vocalizations that are unusual or atypical,” Sheinkopf said. “So vocalizations in babies have been discussed as being useful in developing early identification tools for autism. That’s been a major challenge. How do you find signs of autism in infancy?”
The answer could be encoded in a cry.
“Early detection of developmental disorders is critical,” Lester added. “It can lead to insights into the causes of these disorders and interventions to prevent or reduce the severity of impairment.”
Babies can read each other’s moods
Although it may seem difficult for adults to understand what an infant is feeling, a new study from Brigham Young University finds that it’s so easy a baby could do it.
Psychology professor Ross Flom’s study, published in the academic journal Infancy, shows that infants can recognize each other’s emotions by five months of age. This study comes on the heels of other significant research by Flom on infants’ ability to understand the moods of dogs, monkeys and classical music.
“Newborns can’t verbalize to their mom or dad that they are hungry or tired, so the first way they communicate is through affect or emotion,” says Flom. “Thus it is not surprising that in early development, infants learn to discriminate changes in affect.”
Infants can match emotion in adults at seven months and familiar adults at six months. In order to test infant’s perception of their peer’s emotions, Flom and his team of researchers tested a baby’s ability to match emotional infant vocalizations with a paired infant facial expression.
“We found that 5 month old infants can match their peer’s positive and negative vocalizations with the appropriate facial expression,” says Flom. “This is the first study to show a matching ability with an infant this young. They are exposed to affect in a peer’s voice and face which is likely more familiar to them because it’s how they themselves convey or communicate positive and negative emotions.”
In the study, infants were seated in front of two monitors. One of the monitors displayed video of a happy, smiling baby while the other monitor displayed video of a second sad, frowning baby. When audio was played of a third happy baby, the infant participating in the study looked longer to the video of the baby with positive facial expressions. The infant also was able to match negative vocalizations with video of the sad frowning baby. The audio recordings were from a third baby and not in sync with the lip movements of the babies in either video.
“These findings add to our understanding of early infant development by reiterating the fact that babies are highly sensitive to and comprehend some level of emotion,” says Flom. “Babies learn more in their first 2 1/2 years of life than they do the rest of their lifespan, making it critical to examine how and what young infants learn and how this helps them learn other things.”
Flom co-authored the study of 40 infants from Utah and Florida with Professor Lorraine Bahrick from Florida International University.
Flom’s next step in studying infant perception is to run the experiments with a twist: test whether babies could do this at even younger ages if instead they were watching and hearing clips of themselves.
And while the talking twin babies in this popular YouTube clip are older, it’s still a lot of fun to watch them babble at each other.
IQ link to baby’s weight gain in first month
New research from the University of Adelaide shows that weight gain and increased head size in the first month of a baby’s life is linked to a higher IQ at early school age.
The study was led by University of Adelaide Public Health researchers, who analysed data from more than 13,800 children who were born full-term.
The results, published today in the international journal Pediatrics, show that babies who put on 40% of their birthweight in the first four weeks had an IQ 1.5 points higher by the time they were six years of age, compared with babies who only put on 15% of their birthweight.
Those with the biggest growth in head circumference also had the highest IQs.
"Head circumference is an indicator of brain volume, so a greater increase in head circumference in a newborn baby suggests more rapid brain growth," says the lead author of the study, Dr Lisa Smithers from the University of Adelaide’s School of Population Health.
"Overall, newborn children who grew faster in the first four weeks had higher IQ scores later in life," she says.
"Those children who gained the most weight scored especially high on verbal IQ at age 6. This may be because the neural structures for verbal IQ develop earlier in life, which means the rapid weight gain during that neonatal period could be having a direct cognitive benefit for the child."
Previous studies have shown the association between early postnatal diet and IQ, but this is the first study of its kind to focus on the IQ benefits of rapid weight gain in the first month of life for healthy newborn babies.
Dr Smithers says the study further highlights the need for successful feeding of newborn babies.
"We know that many mothers have difficulty establishing breastfeeding in the first weeks of their baby’s life," Dr Smithers says.
"The findings of our study suggest that if infants are having feeding problems, there needs to be early intervention in the management of that feeding."
(Image: thebabypicz.com)
‘Back to sleep’ does not affect baby’s ability to roll
UAlberta research shows little change in babies’ ability to roll from their tummy to back and vice versa 20 years after “back to sleep” campaign.
Baby, keep on rolling. A campaign to put babies to bed on their backs to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome has not impaired infants’ rolling abilities, according to University of Alberta research.
Johanna Darrah, a professor of physical therapy in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, says infants develop the ability to roll much the same today as they did 20 years ago when the “back to sleep” campaign was introduced and successfully reduced the occurrence of SIDS. Her research answers fears that the back to sleep campaign, which recommends putting babies to bed on their back instead of their stomach, would hurt an infant’s gross motor development, specifically the ability to roll from tummy to back and vice versa.
“Infant gross motor development hasn’t changed that much in 20 years,” says Darrah. “The thought that babies first roll from their tummy to their back, before they go from their back to their tummy, does not appear to be the case. For most babies, they happen very close together.”
Darrah first studied infant motor development in the early 1990s as a graduate student of former dean Martha Cook Piper when the pair published the Alberta Infant Motor Scale, an observational assessment scale used throughout the world to measure infant motor skill development from birth to walking.
More than 20 years later, Darrah revisited the work, studying the rolling abilities and motor skills development of 725 Canadian infants ranging in age from one week to eight months. One of her goals was to see whether the norms identified and developed 20 years ago still represent the age of emergence of gross motor skills.
Darah notes there is some concern in the physical therapy community that babies develop movement skills like rolling from tummy to back at later ages because of reduced time spent on their stomachs. Those concerns appear to be unfounded, she says, explaining that her results are particularly valuable for health-care practitioners specializing in early childhood development.
“Our results would suggest that gross motor skills emerge in the same order and at the same ages as 20 years ago. The environment is of course important to gross motor development, but the change in a sleeping position hasn’t made much difference as to when babies roll from stomach to back.”
Premature birth interrupts brain development
Imaging technique shows premature birth interrupts vital brain development processes, leading to reduced cognitive abilities in infants
Researchers from King’s College London have for the first time used a novel form of MRI to identify crucial developmental processes in the brain that are vulnerable to the effects of premature birth. This new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows that disruption of these specific processes can have an impact on cognitive function.
The researchers say the new techniques developed here will enable them to explore how the disruption of key processes can also cause conditions such as autism, and will be used in future studies to test possible treatments to prevent brain damage.
Scientists from King’s College London and Imperial College London used diffusion MRI – a type of imaging which looks at the natural diffusion of water – to observe the maturation of the cerebral cortex where much of the brain’s computing power resides. By analysing the diffusion of water in the cerebral cortex of 55 premature infants and 10 babies born at full term they mapped the growing complexity and density of nerve cells across the whole of the cortex in the months before the normal time of birth.
They found that during this period maturation was most rapid in areas of the brain relating to social and emotional processing, decision making, working memory and visual-spatial processing. These functions are often impaired after premature birth, and the researchers found that cortical development was reduced in preterm compared to full term infants, with the greatest effect in the most premature infants. When they re-examined the infants at two years of age, the preterm infants with the slowest cortical development performed less well on neurodevelopmental testing, demonstrating the longer-term impact of prematurity on cortical maturation.
Professor David Edwards, Director of the Centre for the Developing Brain at King’s, based at the Evelina Children’s Hospital, said: ‘The number of babies born prematurely is increasing, so it has never been more important to improve our understanding of how preterm birth affects brain development and causes brain damage. We know that prematurity is extremely stressful for an infant, but by using a new technique we are able to track brain maturation in babies to pinpoint the exact processes that might be affected by premature birth. Here we have used innovative ways to understand how the development of the cerebral cortex is affected.
‘These findings highlight a key stage of brain development where the neurons branch out to create a complex, mature structure. We can now see that this happens in the latter stages of development that would usually take place in healthy babies when they are still in the womb. This suggests that premature birth can interrupt this vital developmental process. It may explain why we sometimes see adverse effects on brain development in those born only slightly prematurely as we now know that this process is happening right up to the normal time of birth. With this study we found that the earlier a baby is born, the less mature the cortex structure. The weeks a baby loses in the womb really matter.
‘These new techniques we’ve developed to identify these crucial processes will allow us to examine how disruption caused by premature birth can lead to conditions such as autism and learning difficulties. We will also use the technique in future studies to test new treatments to prevent brain damage. It’s an extremely exciting step forward.’
(Source: kcl.ac.uk)
Women’s, men’s brains respond differently to hungry infant’s cries
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have uncovered firm evidence for what many mothers have long suspected: women’s brains appear to be hard-wired to respond to the cries of a hungry infant.
Researchers asked men and women to let their minds wander, then played a recording of white noise interspersed with the sounds of an infant crying. Brain scans showed that, in the women, patterns of brain activity abruptly switched to an attentive mode when they heard the infant cries, whereas the men’s brains remained in the resting state.
“Previous studies have shown that, on an emotional level, men and women respond differently to the sound of an infant crying,” said study co-author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the institute that conducted the study. “Our findings indicate that men and women show marked differences in terms of attention as well.”
The earlier studies showed that women are more likely than men to feel sympathy when they hear an infant cry, and are more likely to want to care for the infant.
Dr. Bornstein collaborated with Nicola De Pisapia, Ph.D., Paola Rigo, Simona DeFalco, Ph.D., and Paola Venuti, Ph.D., all of the Observation, Diagnosis and Education Lab at the University of Trento, Italy, and Gianluca Esposito, Ph.D., of RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan.
Their findings appear in NeuroReport.
Previous studies have shown differences in patterns of brain activity between when an individual’s attention is focused and when the mind wanders. The pattern of unfocused activity is referred to as default mode, Dr. Bornstein explained. When individuals focus on something in particular, their brains disengage from the default mode and activate other brain networks.
For about 15 minutes, participants listened to white noise interspersed with short periods of silence and with the sounds of a hungry infant crying. The patterns of their brain activity were recorded by a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging.
The researchers analyzed brain images from 18 adults, parents and nonparents. The researchers found that when participants listened to the typical infant cries, the brain activity of men and women differed. When hearing a hungry infant cry, women’s brains were more likely to disengage from the default mode, indicating that they focused their attention on the crying. In contrast, the men’s brains tended to remain in default mode during the infant crying sounds. The brain patterns did not vary between parents and nonparents.
Infants cry because they are distressed, hungry, or in need of physical closeness. To determine if adults respond differently to different types of cries, the researchers also played the cries of infants who were later diagnosed with autism. An earlier study of Dr. Bornstein and the same Italian group found that the cries of infants who develop ASD tend to be higher pitched than those of other infants and that the pauses between cries are shorter. In this other study, both men and women tended to interrupt their mind wandering when they heard these cries.
“Adults have many-layered responses to the things infants do,” said Dr. Bornstein. “Determining whether these responses differ between men and women, by age, and by parental status, helps us understand instincts for caring for the very young.”
In an earlier study, Dr. Bornstein and his colleagues found that patterns of brain activity in men and women also changed when they viewed an image of an infant face and that the patterns were indicative of a predisposition to relate to and care for the infant.
Such studies documenting the brain activity patterns of adults represent first stages of research in neuroscience understanding how adults relate to and care for infants, Dr. Bornstein explained. It is possible that not all adults exhibit the brain patterns seen in these studies.