Eye contact with your baby helps synchronise your brainwaves

Making eye contact with an infant makes adults' and babies' brainwaves 'get in sync' with each other - which is likely to support communication and learning - according to researchers at the University of Cambridge. When the adult and infant are looking at each other, they are signalling their availability and intention to communicate with each other - Victoria Leong When a parent and infant interact, various aspects of their behaviour can synchronise, including their gaze, emotions and heartrate, but little is known about whether their brain activity also synchronises - and what the consequences of this might be. Brainwaves reflect the group-level activity of millions of neurons and are involved in information transfer between brain regions. Previous studies have shown that when two adults are talking to each other, communication is more successful if their brainwaves are in synchrony. Researchers at the Baby-LINC Lab at the University of Cambridge carried out a study to explore whether infants can synchronise their brainwaves to adults too - and whether eye contact might influence this. Their results are published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) . The team examined the brainwave patterns of 36 infants (17 in the first experiment and 19 in the second) using electroencephalography (EEG), which measures patterns of brain electrical activity via electrodes in a skull cap worn by the participants.