Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though the baby couldn't yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be "on the same wavelength," experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions. This is something that most mothers likely know instinctively, but it has now been proven scientifically and in great detail. A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity. In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact. The research was conducted at the Princeton Baby Lab (http://babylab.princeton.edu), where University researchers study how babies learn to see, talk, and understand the world. "Previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this 'neural synchrony' develops in the first years of life," said Elise Piazza, PhD, an Associate Research Scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the first author on a paper published online on December 17, 2019, in Psychological Science. The article is titled “"Infant and Adult Brains Are Coupled to the Dynamics of Natural Communication.” Dr. Piazza and her co-authors (Liat Hasenfratz, PhD, an Associate Research Scholar in PNI; Uri Hasson, PhD, a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of Graduate Studies; and Casey Lew-Williams, PhD, an Associate Professor of Psychology) posited that neural synchrony has important implications for social development and language learning. Studying real-life, face-to-face communication between babies and adults is quite difficult.Login Or Register To Read Full Story