ArticleScientific reports2017
Duration of motherhood has incremental effects on mothers' neural processing of infant vocal cues: a neuroimaging study of women.
Article in Scientific reports, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Navigating Stress: Exploring the Role of Empathy in Caregiving.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Altered functional connectivity of emotional circuits and default mode network in postpartum women: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Selective attenuation of neural responses to own infant's face in early motherhood: a longitudinal magnetoencephalography study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Investigating the role of executive function in brain responses to infant crying among new parents.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Orbitofrontal cortex influences dopamine dynamics associated with alloparental behavioral acquisition in female mice.Science advances · 2025Article
- Investigating Learning, Decision-Making, and Mental Health in Pregnancy: Insights From a UK Cohort Study.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Maternal History of Childhood Maltreatment and Brain Responses to Infant Cues Across the Postpartum Period.Child maltreatment · 2024Article
- Attachment Reminders Trigger Widespread Synchrony across Multiple Brains.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Neural activation to infant cry among Latina and non-Latina White mothers.Behavioural brain research · 2023Article
- Mapping the effects of pregnancy on resting state brain activity, white matter microstructure, neural metabolite concentrations and grey matter architecture.Nature communications · 2022Article
- The naturalistic approach to laughter in humans and other animals: towards a unified theory.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- The web of laughter: frontal and limbic projections of the anterior cingulate cortex revealed by cortico-cortical evoked potential from sites eliciting laughter.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Maternal socioeconomic disadvantage, neural function during volitional emotion regulation, and parenting.Social neuroscience · 2022Article
- Motherhood and theory of mind: increased activation in the posterior cingulate cortex and insulae.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Less can be more: Fine tuning the maternal brain.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Increased activation in the bilateral anterior insulae in response to others in pain in mothers compared to non-mothers.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Neurocognitive processing of infant stimuli in mothers and non-mothers: psychophysiological, cognitive and neuroimaging evidence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Article
- Do Pregnancy-Induced Brain Changes Reverse? The Brain of a Mother Six Years after Parturition.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Neuroprotective Effects of Motherhood on Brain Function in Late Life: A Resting-State fMRI Study.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Article
- Longitudinal Study of Maternal Beliefs About Infant Crying During the Postpartum Period: Interplay With Infant's Temperament.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
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.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.