When you lock eyes with a baby, it’s hard to look away. For one thing, babies are fun to look at.
They’re so tiny and cute and interesting. For another, babies love to stare back. I remember my babies staring at me so hard, with their eyebrows
raised and unblinking eyes wide open.
They would
have killed in a staring contest.
This mutual adoration of staring may be for a good
reason. When a baby and an adult make eye contact,
their brain waves fall in sync , too, a new study finds.
And those shared patterns of brain activity may
actually pave the way for better communication
between baby and adult: Babies make more sweet,
little sounds when their eyes are locked onto an adult
who is looking back.
The scientists report the results
online November 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
Psychologist Victoria Leong of the University of
Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University in
Singapore and colleagues invited infants into the lab
for two experiments. In the first, the team outfitted 17
8-month-old babies with EEG caps, headwear
covered with electrodes that measure the collective
behavior of nerve cells across the brain.
The infants
watched a video in which an experimenter, also
outfitted in an EEG cap, sung a nursery rhyme while
looking either straight ahead at the baby, at the baby
but with her head turned at a 20-degree angle, or
away from the baby and with her head turned at a 20-
degree angle.
When the researcher looked at the baby (either facing
the baby or with her head slightly turned), the
babies’ brains responded, showing activity patterns
that started to closely resemble those of the
researcher.
The second experiment moved the test into real life.
The same researcher from the video sat near 19
different babies. Again, both the babies and the
researcher wore EEG caps to record their brain
activity.
The real-life eye contact prompted brain
patterns similar to those seen in the video experiment:
When eyes met, brain activity fell in sync; when eyes
wandered, brain activity didn’t match as closely.
The baby’s and the adult’s brain activity appeared
to get in sync by meeting in the middle. When gazes
were shared, a baby’s brain waves became more like
the researcher’s, and the researcher’s more like
the baby’s. That finding is “giving new insights into
infants’ amazing abilities to connect to, and tune in
with, their adult caregivers,” Leong says.
What are simpatico brain waves actually good for, you
might ask? Well, researchers don’t know exactly, but
they have some ideas. When high school students’
brain waves were in sync with one another, the kids
reported being more engaged in the classroom , a
recent study found. And when two adults reach a
mutual understanding, their brains synchronize, too,
says another study. These findings hint that such
synchronization lets signals flow easily between two
brains, though Leong says that much more research
needs to be done before scientists understand
synchronization’s relevance to babies’
communication and learning.
That easy signal sending is something that happened
between the babies and the adult, too. When the
experimenter was looking at the babies, the babies
made more vocalizations. And in turn, these sweet
sounds seemed to have made the experimenter’s
brain waves even more similar to those of the babies.
It’s a beautiful cycle, it seems, when eyes and brains
meet. And that meeting spot is probably where some
interesting learning happens, for both adult and baby.
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