Birthing a new maternal cognition literature: 10 recommendations for future research.

Whilst the field of maternal cognition is gaining interest, with a recent increase in publications, there are still only a handful of existing studies. This presents a unique opportunity for reflection and growth, advancing scientific rigor to ensure that future interpretations of maternal cognitive functioning are based on robust, generalizable data. With this in mind, we offer ten recommendations for future cognitive research in motherhood, with a focus on intentional study design.

Brainwide Anatomical Connectivity and Prediction of Longitudinal Outcomes in Antipsychotic-Naïve First-Episode Psychosis.

Background: Disruptions of axonal connectivity are thought to be a core pathophysiological feature of psychotic illness, but whether they are present early in the illness, prior to antipsychotic exposure, and whether they can predict clinical outcome remain unknown.

Methods: We acquired diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance images to map structural connectivity between each pair of 319 parcellated brain regions in 61 antipsychotic-naïve individuals with first-episode psychosis (15-25 years, 46% female) and a demographically matched sample of 27 control participants. Clinical follow-up data were also acquired in patients 3 and 12 months after the scan.

Protective role of parenthood on age-related brain function in mid- to late-life.

The experience of parenthood can profoundly alter one's body, mind, and environment, yet we know little about the long-term associations between parenthood and brain function and aging in adulthood. Here, we investigate the link between number of children parented (parity) and age on brain function in 19,964 females and 17,607 males from the UK Biobank. In both females and males, increased parity was positively associated with functional connectivity, particularly within the somato/motor network.

The maternal brain is more flexible and responsive at rest: effective connectivity of the parental caregiving network in postpartum mothers.

The field of neuroscience has largely overlooked the impact of motherhood on brain function outside the context of responses to infant stimuli. Here, we apply spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM) to resting-state fMRI data to investigate differences in brain function between a group of 40 first-time mothers at 1-year postpartum and 39 age- and education-matched women who have never been pregnant. Using spDCM, we investigate the directionality (top-down vs.

Matrescence: lifetime impact of motherhood on cognition and the brain.

Profound environmental, hormonal, and neurobiological changes mark the transition to motherhood as a major biosocial life event. Despite the ubiquity of motherhood, the enduring impact of caregiving on cognition and the brain across the lifespan is not well characterized and represents a unique window of opportunity to investigate human neural and cognitive development. By integrating insights from the human and animal maternal brain literatures with theories of cognitive ageing, we outline a framework for understanding maternal neural and cognitive changes across the lifespan.

Internal noise measures in coarse and fine motion direction discrimination tasks and the correlation with autism traits.

Motion perception is essential for visual guidance of behavior and is known to be limited by both internal additive noise (i.e., a constant level of random fluctuations in neural activity independent of the stimulus) and motion pooling (global integration of local motion signals across space).

Evidence of Subjective, But Not Objective, Cognitive Deficit in New Mothers at 1-Year Postpartum.

The experience and even existence of cognitive deficits in the postpartum period is uncertain, with only a few scientific studies, reporting inconsistent results. In this study, we investigate cognition in 86 women (43 first-time mothers 1 year postpartum and 43 non-mothers). Mothers and non-mothers showed no significant differences on measures of objective cognition (verbal memory, working memory, and processing speed or theory of mind).

Centering inclusivity in the design of online conferences-An OHBM-Open Science perspective.

As the global health crisis unfolded, many academic conferences moved online in 2020. This move has been hailed as a positive step towards inclusivity in its attenuation of economic, physical, and legal barriers and effectively enabled many individuals from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented to join and participate. A number of studies have outlined how moving online made it possible to gather a more global community and has increased opportunities for individuals with various constraints, e.

Metabolic and Hemodynamic Resting-State Connectivity of the Human Brain: A High-Temporal Resolution Simultaneous BOLD-fMRI and FDG-fPET Multimodality Study.

Simultaneous [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography functional magnetic resonance imaging (FDG-PET/fMRI) provides the capacity to image 2 sources of energetic dynamics in the brain-glucose metabolism and the hemodynamic response. fMRI connectivity has been enormously useful for characterizing interactions between distributed brain networks in humans. Metabolic connectivity based on static FDG-PET has been proposed as a biomarker for neurological disease, but FDG-sPET cannot be used to estimate subject-level measures of "connectivity," only across-subject "covariance.

Neuroprotective Effects of Motherhood on Brain Function in Late Life: A Resting-State fMRI Study.

The maternal brain undergoes structural and functional plasticity during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Little is known about functional plasticity outside caregiving-specific contexts and whether changes persist across the lifespan. Structural neuroimaging studies suggest that parenthood may confer a protective effect against the aging process; however, it is unknown whether parenthood is associated with functional brain differences in late life.

"Phantom Kicks": Women's Subjective Experience of Fetal Kicks After the Postpartum Period.

During pregnancy, a woman will attribute increased abdominal sensations to fetal movement. Surprisingly, many women report that they feel kick sensations long after the pregnancy; however, this experience has never been reported in the scientific literature. We used a qualitative approach to survey  = 197 women who had previously been pregnant.

Relationship between parenthood and cortical thickness in late adulthood.

Pregnancy and the early postpartum period alter the structure of the brain; particularly in regions related to parental care. However, the enduring effects of this period on human brain structure and cognition in late life is unknown. Here we use magnetic resonance imaging to examine differences in cortical thickness related to parenthood in late life, for both sexes.

Individual differences in haemoglobin concentration influence bold fMRI functional connectivity and its correlation with cognition.

Resting-state connectivity measures the temporal coherence of the spontaneous neural activity of spatially distinct regions, and is commonly measured using BOLD-fMRI. The BOLD response follows neuronal activity, when changes in the relative concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated haemoglobin cause fluctuations in the MRI T2* signal. Since the BOLD signal detects changes in relative concentrations of oxy/deoxy-haemoglobin, individual differences in haemoglobin levels may influence the BOLD signal-to-noise ratio in a manner independent of the degree of neural activity.