Brain function in caregivers and infants – insights from experimental studies, dyadic interactions and synchrony.

There is a wealth of evidence on the role of caregiver input on behavioural characteristics of infant attention, cognition and socio-emotional wellbeing. There is, however, limited evidence on underlying brain function, and brain-behaviour links. These underpinnings are important to understand to shed light on mechanisms in preverbal infants who cannot be successfully engaged in multiple experiments with differing conditions, to establish continuity with lifespan research, and to contribute towards better characterizing individual differences. I will explore these caregiver-infant brain-behaviour links through three studies on the same population. In the first study, I will investigate whether caregiver visual working memory is linked to infant visual working memory, at the level of behaviour and brain function, using similar preferential looking tasks. In the second study, I will examine spatio-functional brain correlates of joint attention in caregivers and infants, and continued attention in infants during dyadic interactions. In the third study, I investigate whether interbrain synchrony between caregivers and infants is linked to caregiver scaffolding, and infant object engagement.