Replication Data for: Parenting Experience Facilitates Couple’s Brain-to-Brain Synchrony

Co-parenting is the collaborative effort between adults to coordinate their caregiving behaviours to respond to their child's needs and to the environment. While extensive investigation has been conducted to uncover the link between child signals and parental brain responses, little has been inquired on how co-parenting the same child influences partners’ brain-to-brain coordination when attending to salient human vocalisations. Synchrony is conceptualised as the matching of behavioural and physiological signals between two persons. We hypothesise that brain-to-brain synchrony can be observed within couples in response to these salient stimuli. We used functional Near-infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) on 24 mother-father dyads (N = 48) to measure their prefrontal cortical (PFC) activities while they listen to the vocalisations in two conditions, together and separately. Analyses show that couples with more parenting experience, approximated by the age of their child, exhibit greater brain synchrony to the vocalisations. Synchrony was observed in the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), an area known for attentional regulation and evaluation of infant signals, as well as the left frontal eye field (FEF), an area known for the initiation of eye movements in response to salient environmental cues. Our result suggests that the experience of parenting an infant together might establish synchrony in attentional regulation mechanisms over time toward socially relevant stimuli. This finding holds tremendous implications on the development of the co-parenting relationship and its effects on parenting responses.