Eye Contact in Infancy Helps Communication

[Badri]

Babies’ brainwaves slip into the same rhythm as a parent’s when they look into each other’s eyes, according to scientists at Cambridge University. In their experiment a researcher sang nursery rhymes to babies while making eye contact. Electrode skullcaps indicated that her brain and those of the babies showed “neural coupling”, which “could prepare parents and babies to communicate by synchronising when to speak and when to listen,” Victoria Leong, the lead researcher, said.

The study was in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America”