Poster B57, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Vasopressin modulates the neural response to infant cries in fathers
Jurriaan Witteman1, Anna van 't Veer1, Sandra Thijssen1, Niels Schiller1, Marinus Van IJzendoorn1, Marian Bakermans-Kranenburg2;1Leiden University, 2Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Introduction: Human infant cries communicate adverse psychophysiological states. An adequate response of parents is crucial for survival, making it likely that a neural network has evolved to ‘automatically’ detect infant cries.1 The present study presented task irrelevant infant cries to fathers during a verbal working memory task to test to what extent neural processing of infant cries persists despite low attentional resources. In non-human mammals, the hormone arginine vasopressin (AVP) has been shown to influence paternal caregiving2, so maybe AVP modulates automatic cry perception in fathers. Therefore, we tested whether AVP administration modulates automatic processing of infant cries among human fathers. Methods: Task irrelevant infant cries and acoustically matched control sounds were presented in an event-related paradigm while fathers (N = 23) memorized 1 letter (low load) or 5 letters (high load) and decided whether a target letter was present among the remembered letter(s) for a total of 96 trials. All fathers took part in two fMRI sessions with exactly the same protocol but with either intranasal AVP (20 IU) or placebo spray administered approximately 55 minutes before the working memory task. The EPI scans were analysed in FSL with EV’s CryLo, CryHi, ControlLo, ConrolHi at first level. At second level, the main effects of Sound (Cry vs. Control) and Load (Low vs. High) were modelled and the interaction with Hormone (AVP, Placebo). Clusters were determined by a Z > 2.3 cluster forming threshold and p < 0.05 cluster correction. Results: RM-ANOVA of the behavioral data revealed a main effect of Load (F(1,22) = 100.3, p < .001) and of Hormone (F(1,22) = 3.43, p = .05), showing that performance degraded under High load and AVP administration. On the neural level, infant cries activated the bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG) and High load (vs. low load) was associated with activation of frontoparietal areas previously implicated in working memory. Crucially, there was a Sound × Hormone interaction in the left inferior parietal cortex, continuing medially into the precuneus. Extraction of activation in this area for every condition against baseline revealed that AVP decreased deactivation for cry sounds, but increased deactivation for control sounds. Conclusion: Infant cries activated the ‘cry network’ known from the previous literature3, even though attention was diverted away from the auditory channel, suggesting that infant cries are processed relatively automatically1. AVP may have reduced working memory performance by interfering with default mode network (DMN) deactivation, hampering attention allocation to the working memory task. Similar effects have been found previously for ∆9-THC4 administration. References: 1. Pessoa, L., et al. (2002). Neural processing of emotional faces requires attention. PNAS, 99,11458-11463. 2. Rilling, J. (2013). The neural and hormonal bases of human parental care. Neuropsychologia, 51, 731-747. 3. Witteman, J., Van IJzendoorn, M.H., Rilling, J.K., Bos, P.A., Schiller N.O., Bakerman – Kranenburg, M.J. (2019). Towards a neural model of infant cry perception. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 99, 23. 4. Bossong, M.G., et al. (2013). Default mode network in the effects of Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on human executive function. PLoS One, 8, e7074
Themes: Perception: Auditory, Prosody
Method: Functional Imaging