Impacts of reproductive experience on mental processing of infant auditory cues

Abstract: Mothers, especially human mothers, are extremely sensitive to unique acoustic features, emotional valence, and survival cues contained in infant cries and laughter. This article reviews studies on how reproduction alters a mother’s perceptual sensitivity, attention allocation, and emotional processing of infant cries, focusing on various behavioral paradigms based on infant crying stimuli that have been employed in this line of research. Mothers have significantly better perceptional, attentional and emotion processing of infant cries and laughter than non-mothers. Greater activation has been observed in mothers than nonmothers in the multi-layered neural networks, including primary auditory cortex and prefrontal-limbic system. Neurochemical signals, such as oxytocin and dopamine, and sociocultural factors, such as parenting experience and cultural differences are found to be important modulators of mother’s psychological functions. Existing findings support the cognitive reorganization theory, suggesting that brain structure and functions are reorganized to serve mothering behaviors to promote the inclusive fitness of the mother and the young. Future studies need to adopt multimodal designs to distinguish psychological functions to better understand underlying neural mechanisms.