The parental brain: A neural framework for study of teaching in humans and other animals.

Parenting, conceptualized as a specific form of teaching, may inform mentalistic, culture-based, and functional definitions. Combined brain-imaging, hormone-measurement, and cognitive-behavioral analyses indicate the importance of mentalization circuits. These circuits appear to function according to culture, and cross animal species. Further, these approaches shed light on sex differences through work on fathers as well as mothers, are affected by psychopathology, and may be amenable to treatment in ways that may be applied to optimize teaching.

Evolutionary processes and mother-child attachment in intentional change.

Behavioral change may occur through evolutionary processes such as running stochastic evolutionary algorithms, with a fitness function to determine a winning solution from many. A science of intentional change will therefore require identification of fitness functions - causal mechanisms of adaptation - that can be acquired only with analytical approaches. Fitness functions may be subject to early-life experiences with parents, which influence some of the very same brain circuits that may mediate behavioral change through interventions.