44 Chapter 2 merely focused on the impact of gaze direction on facial recognition processes, while we chose to use prolonged eye contact trials (16-38 s) to capture neural processes associated with affiliative responses elicited by eye contact. Interestingly, our paradigm enabled us to examine which brain regions increase or decrease in activity over time as the duration of eye contact increases. When we performed exploratory parametric analyses to capture this process at the neural level over the course of the trials, we found an increase in dmPFC activity co-varying with increased presentation time of direct (versus averted) gaze. The dmPFC has been consistently found to play a role in theory of mind and mentalizing (Bzdok et al., 2012), suggesting that prolonged eye contact might involve greater engagement in such higher-order cognitive processes. Moreover, the increased dmPFC activation was associated with feelings of connectedness with others after direct gaze videos specifically, indicating that parents who showed greater increases in dmPFC activation as eye contact duration increases also reported higher levels of connectedness with others after exposure to direct (versus averted) gaze. Moreover, this finding is in line with a study of Cavallo et al. (2015) who found that the dmPFC was specifically activated when participants reciprocated the direct gaze of the target to establish a mutual gaze. Independent of gaze direction, parents showed a decreased deactivation in middle/inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus in response to the sight of their own child versus others. Prior work implicated these regions in processing of personally familiar stimuli, such as faces of parents and romantic partners (Taylor et al., 2009). Furthermore, parents showed decreased deactivation in IFG, a brain region involved in the automated internal representation of others’ mental states and is part of the mirror-neuron system, which is directly linked to empathy (Feldman, 2017). Decreased deactivation in this region has consistently been linked to parental caregiving and is found in parents when presented with various types of stimuli of their own child versus an unfamiliar child (i.e., cry, imagined situation, pictures, video fragments) (Bornstein et al., 2017; Feldman, 2015; Feldman, 2017; Wever et al., 2021). Taken together, these findings indicate a robust pattern of activation for the sight of parents’ own adolescent child versus others in cortical face processing and the mirror-neuron system. Regarding parents’ responses to the sight of an unfamiliar child versus an unfamiliar adult, we did not find any differences at the subjective level, nor at the neural level. This was not in line with our hypothesis based on the prior findings of Leibenluft et al. (2004), who found increased neural responses in parents in fusiform gyrus, intraparietal sulcus, precuneus, and posterior STS to the sight of an unfamiliar child versus an unfamiliar adult. One possible explanation is that in the present study we presented parents with prolonged video stimuli, while Leibenluft et al. (2004) used static pictures that lasted only 1.5 s. This might suggest that the differential neural responses to the sight of an unfamiliar child versus adult might lie in the initial decoding phase of face perception, shortly after the start of the presentation of the face, rather than in the later, more evaluative, phase, when more complex socio-emotional aspects of eye contact are
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