View clinical trials related to Neuronal Activity.
Filter by:Understanding babies' signals is essential to meet their needs. Recent works suggest that crying provides useful information, not only allowing parents to recognize their baby among others (static information), but also to distinguish between mild discomfort and pain cries (dynamic information). The perception of this information by adults involves a "parental" brain network including brain areas involved in empathy, attention, emotional regulation, motor as well as regions of the limbic system or associated with the reward network.
Crying is the primary signaling strategy available to the human newborn for eliciting parental care. Yet, the investigators only have superficial understanding of the information carried by cries, and how this information is perceived by parents. Using modern tools of sound processing and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiment, this study aims to investigate cry-induced brain activation in adult depending on the cry's acoustic properties expressing various degrees of stress and distress levels. For that, Adults will be tested inside a fMRI magnet to determine their brain activations elicited by different babies cries according to whether the cry was evoked in a pain situation or not. The cerebral activity will be investigated in relation to acoustic features of cries (e.g. with pitch and/or roughness variations). To test if the gender or parentally of adult listeners influence their perceptions and brain responses, the task will be applied to 2 different groups (men and women not-parents). The hypothesis is that the brain of adult listeners will be able to discriminate adequately the intensity of the pain mediated by the cries. This process should involve brain areas such as the insular and the orbito frontal cortex that are known to participate in the integration of pain intensity and pain controls. The experiment should also determine which one of the acoustic features is able to transmit pain and to recruit brain areas involved in pain processes.