Cuteness in offspring is a potent protective mechanism that ensures survival for otherwise completely dependent infants. Previous research has linked cuteness to early ethological ideas of a “kindchenschema” (infant schema) where infant facial features serve as “innate releasing mechanisms” for instinctual caregiving behaviours. We propose extending the concept of cuteness beyond visual features to include positive infant sounds and smells. Evidence from behavioural and neuroimaging studies links this extended concept of cuteness to simple “instinctual” behaviours and to caregiving, protection and complex emotions. We review how cuteness supports key parental capacities by igniting fast privileged neural activity followed by slower processing in large brain networks also involved in play, empathy, and perhaps even higher-order moral emotions.

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The bond between a parent and an infant often appears to form effortlessly and intuitively, and this relationship is fundamental to infant survival and development. Parenting is considered to depend on specific brain networks that are largely conserved across species and in place even before parenthood. Efforts to understand the neural basis of parenting in humans have focused on the overlapping networks implicated in reward and social cognition, within which the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is considered to be a crucial hub. This review examines emerging evidence that the OFC may be engaged in several phases of parent-infant interactions, from early, privileged orienting to infant cues, to ongoing monitoring of interactions and subsequent learning. Specifically, we review evidence suggesting that the OFC rapidly responds to a range of infant communicative cues, such as faces and voices, supporting their efficient processing. Crucially, this early orienting response may be fundamental in supporting adults to respond rapidly and appropriately to infant needs. We suggest a number of avenues for future research, including investigating neural activity in disrupted parenting, exploring multimodal cues, and consideration of neuroendocrine involvement in responsivity to infant cues. An increased understanding of the brain basis of caregiving will provide insight into our greatest challenge: parenting our young.

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The perception of infant emotionality, one aspect of temperament, starts to form in infancy, yet the underlying mechanisms of how infant emotionality affects adult neural dynamics remain unclear. We used a social reward task with probabilistic visual and auditory feedback (infant laughter or crying) to train 47 nulliparous women to perceive the emotional style of six different infants. Using functional neuroimaging, we subsequently measured brain activity while participants were tested on the learned emotionality of the six infants. We characterized the elicited patterns of dynamic functional brain connectivity using Leading Eigenvector Dynamics Analysis and found significant activity in a brain network linking the orbitofrontal cortex with the amygdala and hippocampus, where the probability of occurrence significantly correlated with the valence of the learned infant emotional disposition. In other words, seeing infants with neutral face expressions after having interacted and learned their various degrees of positive and negative emotional dispositions proportionally increased the activity in a brain network previously shown to be involved in pleasure, emotion, and memory. These findings provide novel neuroimaging insights into how the perception of happy versus sad infant emotionality shapes adult brain networks.

This article explores coproduction in relation to autistic people. We reflect on the coproduction process with autistic adults from the Authentistic Research Collective at University College London. We aimed to support the autistic population's mental health needs by coproducing a document on adapting psychological therapy, and by developing a set of reflective guidelines to guide and encourage future coproduction initiatives between autistic and nonautistic team members. We reflect upon six elements that are of potential importance for future coproduction projects with autistic adults: (1) the meaning of coproduction; (2) ground rules and a traffic light system; (3) environmental adaptations; (4) digital communication tools; (5) encouraging authenticity; and (6) supporting autistic strengths. We conclude by discussing future research avenues into optimizing coproduction with autistic people, and how such research may influence both practice and policy.

One of the defining elements of jazz is the ability to improvise. The neuroscience of jazz improvisation has shown promising results for understanding domain-specific and domaingeneral processes of creativity. However, until date no previous studies have examined how different modes of improvisation (musical creativity) evolve over time and which cognitive mechanisms are responsible for different stages of musical creation. Here, we used fMRI to measure for the first time the dynamic neural substrates of musical creativity in 16 skilled jazz pianists while they improvised freely (iFreely), and by melody (iMelody), and contrasted with resting-state. We used the leading eigenvector dynamics analysis (LEiDA) to explore the whole-brain dynamics underlying spontaneous musical creation. Our results reveal a substate comprising areas of the dorsal default mode (DMN), the left executive control (ECN), the anterior salience, language and precuneus networks with significantly higher probability of occurrence in iFreely than in iMelody. In addition, iFreely is also linked to an increased prevalence and dynamic attachment to this substate and to a "global" substate. Such indicates that a more free mode of improvisation (iFreely) requires an increased dynamic convergence to networks comprising brain areas involved in processes linked to creativity (generation, evaluation, prediction, and syntactic processing). iMelody, a more constrained mode of improvisation involves a higher recurrence of brain regions involved in auditory and reward processes. This study brings new insights into the large-scale brain mechanisms supporting and promoting the complex process of creativity, specifically in the context of music improvisation in jazz.