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Recent scientific report Research has found the existence of neural fingerprints shared between parents and children when listening to stories.
study: Parent-child couples display shared neural fingerprints while listening to stories. Image credit: Evgeny Atamanenko/Shutterstock.com
background
Parents and caregivers are the most important people for children. Parent-child interactions play an important role in children’s well-being, especially in the development of children’s cognitive abilities.
Behavioral and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that parent-child interactions help shape a child’s executive function system, along with limbic abilities.
Moreover, parental emotion regulation determines the child’s emotional characteristics, which is related to the nervous system.
Previous neurobiological models of parent-child interactions have shown that parents coordinate their children’s brain activity toward the execution of higher-level cognitive and social processes.
Hyperscanning methods were developed to better understand the neurobiological determinants of parent-child interactions.
These methods can help synchronize brain activity during parent-infant couple interactions, allowing researchers to better understand shared neurobiological activity.
Hyperscan data for parent-child couples showed more emotional synchronization. For example, comparable resting-state neuronal connectivity profiles were observed between them while watching an emotional movie.
In another study, scanner images showed similar neural activity between mothers and teens, when mothers witnessed their teens perform difficult tasks.
In addition to hyperscanning techniques, connectome-based predictive models (CPMs) are another approach designed to understand within-group variation in brain-behavior relationships.
This method allows us to reliably predict a child’s cognitive abilities. A limited number of studies have shown the effectiveness of connectome fingerprinting (FC) approaches in differentiating individuals based on their brain connectivity patterns.
About research
This study hypothesized that biological parent-child couples exhibit similar and unique patterns of functional connectivity, particularly those related to emotional and executive function systems.
Therefore, brain connectivity profiles obtained in story listening tasks could potentially be used to identify parent-child couples.
We used the diffusion map (DM) framework, a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique, to establish meaningful functional connectivity similarities between parents and children.
A total of 13 Hebrew-speaking children between the ages of 8 and 12 were recruited along with one of their biological parents.
The average age of the parents was 42.4 years. All adopted parent-child couples were Caucasian and from relatively affluent socio-economic backgrounds.
None of the participants had a history of neurological or developmental disorders. They had him undergo two separate computer neuroimaging scans up to a month apart.
It should be noted that participants were asked to listen to a story played during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Additionally, behavioral assessments were also conducted in both sessions.
research result
Functional MRI data demonstrated the existence of shared neural determinants between biological parent-child dyads.
Importantly, similar brain connectivity profiles are recorded while listening and can be used to identify biological parent-child couples.
Consistent with the results of previous studies, the current study demonstrated increased brain-to-brain synchronization among individuals with similar characteristics.
This study also reflects the existence of similarities in brain activation during listening among socially connected people. The greatest number of parent-child FC similarities was observed within the DMN-frontoparietal (FP) node.
Previous studies have shown that the Gestalt cortex is involved in the generation of subjective perspective. Brain similarities in FC may be due to shared cognitions revealed through story interpretation.
Higher involvement of salience-memory and cerebello-cerebellar nodes was observed in positive neural fingerprints. This finding suggests that biological parents and children use similar cognitive and sensory brain networks that support cognitive monitoring and processing while listening to stories.
This study hypothesized that during listening comprehension, the parent’s cerebellum plays an important role in modulating the child’s language processing.
Additionally, similar neural activity occurs in parent-child couples when retrieving information from memory to support story comprehension.
This study used two cognitive-based integration (CBI) submodels. This showed that biological parent-child couples share similarities and differences in FC.
These can be used as fMRI-based neural fingerprints. Future studies should focus on the range of genetic and environmental factors that influence connectome similarity.
conclusion
The current study highlights the existence of clear functional correlates involving both cognitive and sensory networks shared between biological parent-child couples during story listening.
We also documented supporting evidence involving the use of neural fingerprints to identify biological parentage.
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