We have located links that may give you full text access.
Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Duration of motherhood has incremental effects on mothers' neural processing of infant vocal cues: a neuroimaging study of women.
Scientific Reports 2017 May 12
The transition to motherhood, and the resultant experience of caregiving, may change the way women respond to affective, infant signals in their environments. Nonhuman animal studies have robustly demonstrated that mothers process both infant and other salient signals differently from nonmothers. Here, we investigated how women with and without young infants respond to vocalisations from infants and adults (both crying and neutral). We examined mothers with infants ranging in age (1-14 months) to examine the effects of duration of maternal experience. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that mothers showed greater activity than nonmothers to vocalisations from adults or infants in a range of cortical regions implicated in the processing of affective auditory cues. This main effect of maternal status suggests a general difference in vocalisation processing across infant and adult sounds. We found that a longer duration of motherhood, and therefore more experience with an infant, was associated with greater infant-specific activity in key parental brain regions, including the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. We suggest that these incremental differences in neural activity in the maternal brain reflect the building of parental capacity over time. This is consistent with conceptualizations of caregiving as a dynamic, learning process in humans.
Full text links
Related Resources
Get seemless 1-tap access through your institution/university
For the best experience, use the Read mobile app
All material on this website is protected by copyright, Copyright © 1994-2024 by WebMD LLC.
This website also contains material copyrighted by 3rd parties.
By using this service, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy.
Your Privacy Choices
You can now claim free CME credits for this literature searchClaim now
Get seemless 1-tap access through your institution/university
For the best experience, use the Read mobile app