“Mommy brain” is a long-held perception that mothers are more forgetful and less attentive.
“Mommy brain” is a long-held perception that mothers are more forgetful and less attentive.
“In most studies, however, attention and memory tests are given to mothers very early postpartum,” said Valerie Tucker Miller, a Ph.D. student in Purdue University’s Department of Anthropology department. Miller is studying the effects of motherhood on attention, memory and other psychological processes.
“There are few issues with that,” she added. “When you first have a child, you have a cascade of hormones and sleep deprivation that might be affecting attention and memory processes in the brain.”
In a new study testing the prevalence of “mommy brain,” Miller used a revised version of the Attention Network Test (ANT), called the ANT-R, to compare reaction times among 60 mothers, all of whom were at least one year postpartum, and 70 non-mothers. The results, published online in the journal Current Psychology, show that mothers performed equally as well or better compared with women who had never been pregnant or had children.
Read more at Purdue University
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