Effects of adult-infant interpersonal neural connectivity on infants’ social learning in Singapore

Affective social referencing via neural synchrony between adult-infant dyads is a critical process that facilitates an infant’s social learning. Hence, this study advances current knowledge by comparing infants’ social learning when interacting with their mothers as compared to strangers and analysing the underpinning neural mechanisms. The effects of adult-infant temperament similarity on an infant’s learning are investigated as well. A total of 44 Singaporean mothers and infants (22 infants, 22 mothers) participated in this study. The experiment involves the infant observing the adult (either Mother or Stranger) expressing either positive or negative affect towards a pair of novel objects. Infants’ subsequent interaction with the objects is taken as a measure of learning. During the experiment, EEG was acquired concurrently from both adults and infants as a measure of neural synchrony. Therefore, we hypothesised that neural synchrony could predict social learning, with higher learning present when an infant interacted with their mother than a stranger. Infants should also learn better from an adult with higher temperament similarity. Despite non-significant results found across some of the hypotheses, mainly due to low statistical power (from a limited number of participants) and basic EEG analyses, the pattern of the results did mostly align with the hypotheses. Significantly higher intra-adult and interneural adult-infant connectivity were also observed at the frontal and central areas when the infant interacted with a stranger (i.e., Stranger condition). Future studies should repeat the paradigm on larger sample size to see if the observed results would reach significance.Bachelor of Arts in Psycholog