ArticleScientific reports2023
The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Examining dynamic changes in prefrontal connectivity and internalizing symptoms during the first and third trimesters of pregnancy.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- Maternal Neuroplasticity: Understanding Brain Changes with Perinatal Depression and Anxiety in Women.Current psychiatry reports · 2026Review
- Neural variability across the transition to motherhood: Enhanced moment-to-moment neural variability during mentalizing in first-time mothers.Journal of neuroendocrinology · 2026Article
- Intrinsic resting-state connectivity and personal meaning across the transition to fatherhood.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Psychedelic therapy and postpartum depression: priorities and prospects.Therapeutic advances in psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Pregnancy entails a U-shaped trajectory in human brain structure linked to hormones and maternal attachment.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Hormonal and structural transformations in the caregiver's brain: Examining themes in parental neurobiology.AIMS neuroscience · 2025Review
- Molecular basis underlying default mode network functional abnormalities in postpartum depression with and without anxiety.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Diffusion tensor imaging of white-matter structural features of maltreating mothers and their associations with intergenerational chain of childhood abuse.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Prenatal prolactin predicts postnatal parenting attitudes and brain structure remodeling in first-time fathers.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The field of neuroscience has largely overlooked the impact of motherhood on brain function outside the context of responses to infant stimuli. Here, we apply spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM) to resting-state fMRI data to investigate differences in brain function between a group of 40 first-time mothers at 1-year postpartum and 39 age- and education-matched women who have never been pregnant. Using spDCM, we investigate the directionality (top-down vs. bottom-up) and valence (inhibition vs excitation) of functional connections between six key left hemisphere brain regions implicated in motherhood: the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens. We show a selective modulation of inhibitory pathways related to differences between (1) mothers and non-mothers, (2) the interactions between group and cognitive performance and (3) group and social cognition, and (4) differences related to maternal caregiving behaviour. Across analyses, we show consistent disinhibition between cognitive and affective regions suggesting more efficient, flexible, and responsive behaviour, subserving cognitive performance, social cognition, and maternal caregiving. Together our results support the interpretation of these key regions as constituting a parental caregiving network. The nucleus accumbens and the parahippocampal gyrus emerging as 'hub' regions of this network, highlighting the global importance of the affective limbic network for maternal caregiving, social cognition, and cognitive performance in the postpartum period.
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