Researchers have found out that babies and adults are likely to be on the same wavelength, as they experience the same brain activity in the same brain regions during play.
The research team was composed of people from Princeton University. They conducted a study on how baby and adult brains interact during playtime, and they found measurable similarities in the neural activity of babies and adults.
The study's first author, Elise Piazza from Princeton University said that previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how neural synchrony starts and develops in the first years of the life of an infant.
What is neural synchrony?
According to the findings of the research that was published in the journal Psychological Science, the research team has posted in the study that neural synchrony has important implications for language learning and social development. Face-to-face communication and studying real-life communication between adults and babies is quite difficult.
But to study real-time communication, the researchers created a new dual-brain neuroimaging system that uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy or fNIRS, which is highly safe and records oxygenation in the blood as a proxy for neural activity.
The setup allowed the researchers to record all of the neural coordination between the adults and babies while they played with toys, sang songs and read books. The same adult played and interacted with all 42 infants and toddlers who joined the study. Of those 42 infants and toddlers, 21 of them had to be excluded because they squirmed too much and three others flat-out refused to wear the cap, thus leaving 18 children, ranging in age from 9 to 15 months.
The conclusion of the experiment
The experiment had two parts. In one, the adults' experimenter spent 5 minutes interacting directly with a child, playing with toys, reading Goodnight Moon, singing nursery rhymes, while the child sat on their lap. Meanwhile, in the second part, the experimenter turned to the side and told a story to another adult while the child who participated played quietly with their parent.
The researchers collected data from at least 57 channels of the brain that are known to be involved in language processing, prediction and understanding the perspective of other people.
And while they looked at the gathered data, the researches found that during the face-to-face sessions, the brains of the babies were synchronized with the brains of the adult's in numerous areas that are known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world, perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or help them analyze the motives of the adults reading it to them.
When the adult and the baby were turned away from each other and they engaged with other people, the coupling between them disappeared. That fit with the expectations of the researchers, but the data also had surprises in store.
Study researcher Casey Lew-Williams said that they were also surprised to find that the infant's brain was usually leading the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just receive input passively but they may guide adults toward the next thing they are going to focus on, like which toy to pick up, which words to say and more.
