Dr Sam Wass | Oscillatory neural correlates of social attunedness: From inter-personal synchrony to self-control?

Behavioural and psychophysiological research has, for decades, suggested that as children and parents communicate they adapt to each other on a moment-by-moment basis. This mutual attunement occurs through the coordination of verbal and non-verbal rhythmic patterns, such as vocalisations, physical movements, eye gaze movements, and facial affect. Less well understood, however, is whether similar mechanisms of mutual attunement also operate at the neural level – and, if so, how they develop and what their significance is. We present findings from two papers that investigate this question. In the first paper, we observed direct infant-adult neural phase-locking in Theta and Alpha (3-9Hz) during social interactions, which is stronger during direct, mutual gaze. Infants who made more communicative attempts to the adult (by vocalising for longer) had a stronger synchronising effect on the adults’ neural activity. In the second paper, we concluded, based on Granger-causal analyses, that adults show fine-grained neural changes in Theta activity that are time-locked to shifts in the infants’ attention, independent of the adult’s own attention shifts. We also found that, where the adult is more neurally responsive, the child is more attentive.

Leong, V., [...]. & Wass, S.V. (2017). Speaker gaze increases information coupling between infant and adult brains. Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. 114 (50), 13290–13295 Link to paper: https://tinyurl.com/yatht4ek

Wass, S.V., [...] & Leong, V. (in press). Parental neural responsivity to infants’ visual attention: how mature brains scaffold immature brains during social interaction. PLoS Biology. Link to paper: https://tinyurl.com/y9ef6tqo

Poster