When a new father gazes at his baby, his brain responds in a unique and remarkable way. A new study reveals that first-time fathers show distinctive brain activity when watching videos of their own infants — activity not seen when viewing other babies or even their pregnant romantic partners.
These findings add weight to the idea that parenthood reshapes the human brain, priming it for sensitive caregiving.
Fathers’ Brains on Baby Time
Parenthood from a neuroscience standpoint has mainly focused on mothers. We have documented how mothers’ brains light up in regions tied to emotion and reward when they interact with their babies. But what about fathers?
That gap motivated Philip Newsome, a PhD student at USC, and his team. “For a little over 20 years, scientists have been studying how mothers’ brains respond to viewing their own infant as a way to understand how biology supports the social and emotional demands of parenting. But compared to mothers, far fewer studies have looked at fathers,” Newsome explained in an interview with PsyPost.
The researchers recruited 32 first-time fathers in Los Angeles. About eight months after their babies were born, the men climbed into an fMRI scanner and watched silent video clips. These included their own child, an unfamiliar baby, their pregnant partner, and a pregnant stranger. The setup allowed researchers to tease apart the effects of infant cues, familiarity, and personal significance.
The results were striking. Fathers’ brains showed greater activation when viewing their own baby compared to unfamiliar infants. Key regions included the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex, both important for social understanding and self-referential thought, as well as the orbitofrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus, linked to emotion and reward.
When fathers watched their own baby versus their partner, the precuneus lit up again. This suggests the paternal brain is especially tuned to infant cues, even beyond the pull of a pair bond.
Bonding, Stress, and the Mentalizing Brain
The study also tied brain responses to parenting experiences. Fathers who felt more bonded — both before and after birth — and less stressed showed stronger activation in the precuneus and posterior cingulate when watching their baby. By contrast, higher parenting stress correlated with weaker responses in those regions.
In other words, the way dads feel about fatherhood appears to shape, and perhaps be shaped by, their neural tuning to their child.
Notably, the amount of time fathers spent as primary caregivers did not predict brain activity. “We were somewhat surprised that fathers’ brain responses weren’t linked to their caregiving experience, like time spent as the primary caregiver,” Newsome told PsyPost. He noted that the modest sample size could have masked such effects.
Using advanced analyses, the team found that regions involved in visual processing, social cognition, and reward could distinguish between viewing one’s own infant and other conditions. These included the parahippocampus, orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior prefrontal cortex.
Such findings are in line with previous research on mothers. But they also suggest fathers may rely more heavily on cortical “mentalizing” areas. These are networks that help us imagine others’ thoughts and feelings. That makes sense even from an evolutionary standpoint, given infants’ preverbal nature: dads must interpret needs without words.
Previously, a small study found that new fathers lost a percentage or two of cortical volume following the birth of their first child. This might sound like a bad thing, but a small loss of gray matter can actually indicate a refinement of the brain that makes connecting with a child more powerful and efficient. Similar cortical losses in mothers, for example, are associated with greater neural responses to a child and stronger child-parent attachment.
What It Means for Fatherhood
This study reinforces a growing body of evidence that fatherhood alters the brain. From an evolutionary standpoint, it fits the broader pattern of humans as cooperative parents, where both mothers and fathers adapt to nurture offspring.
If fathers’ brains are biologically primed for bonding, policies that support paternal leave and caregiving for them could strengthen these neural connections during a crucial bonding window between the father and baby. This may be particularly important given that the research underscores the toll of stress. High stress seemed to dampen fathers’ brain responses to their own children.
The authors acknowledge limitations. Their participants were largely well-educated Southern Californians, and the videos of partners were recorded during pregnancy, potentially confounding the results. Still, the study marks the first direct neural comparison of fathers’ responses to their own infants and partners.
The findings appeared in the journal Human Brain Mapping.
