Mothers' multimodal information processing is modulated by multimodal interactions with their infants

Yukari Tanaka1, Hirokata Fukushima2, Kazuo Okanoya3

  • 11] Graduate school of Education, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan [2] Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Tokyo, Japan.

Scientific Reports
|October 18, 2014
PubMed

Social learning in infancy is known to be facilitated by multimodal (e.g., visual, tactile, and verbal) cues provided by caregivers. In parallel with infants' development, recent research has revealed that maternal neural activity is altered through interaction with infants, for instance, to be sensitive to infant-directed speech (IDS). The present study investigated the effect of mother- infant multimodal interaction on maternal neural activity. Event-related potentials (ERPs) of mothers were compared to non-mothers during perception of tactile-related words primed by tactile cues. Only mothers showed ERP modulation when tactile cues were incongruent with the subsequent words, and only when the words were delivered with IDS prosody. Furthermore, the frequency of mothers' use of those words was correlated with the magnitude of ERP differentiation between congruent and incongruent stimuli presentations. These results suggest that mother-infant daily interactions enhance multimodal integration of the maternal brain in parenting contexts.

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