The effects of attachment and caregiving on neural synchrony in mother-child interactions

Previous research suggests that sensitive caregiving is associated with behavioral and physiological synchrony during mother-infant interactions (Leclère, 2014). With the recent advancements in hyperscannning the neural underpinnings of social synchrony are being discussed (Atzil et al., 2014). Here, we present a dual functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study looking at 36 mother-child dyads to investigate whether maternal attachment and caregiving affected neural synchrony and the quality of mother-child interaction during a problem-solving task. Wavelet transform coherence was used to assess the cross-correlation between the two fNIRS time series. Preliminary results from linear-mixed model analyses with random intercepts revealed a significant increase in neural synchrony in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and tempo-parietal junction (TPJ) when mother and child solved the task in collaboration in comparison to individual problem solving and a resting phase with eyes closed. Further decoding neural synchrony in the collaboration condition, we found that self-reported attachment avoidance in mothers correlated with lower neural synchrony in the right dlPFC. When investigating how maternal sensitivity affected neural synchrony, the results displayed an increase in neural synchrony in the right dlPFC when mother’s described themselves to be more sensitive. Moreover, we found that higher child repsonsiveness predicted higher neural synchrony in frontal areas as well. The findings underscore neural synchrony as an additional valid and promising marker for the quality of mother-child interaction and highlight the complexity of neuro-behavioral synchronization between mother and child. The results will be further discussed in relation to attachment theory