The impact of stimulus type and early motherhood on attentional processing.

The present study evaluated the impact of stimulus type and early motherhood on attentional processing. Auditory ERPs were recorded with a modified novelty oddball paradigm both in mothers who had recently given birth and in control women who were not in the state of early motherhood. Conventional tone pips were used as standards and deviants, and an infant cry served as an experimental stimulus of novelty value. Differences were revealed in the N100 amplitudes between the study groups with higher amplitudes in the mothers. A few days after childbirth the mothers seemed to be in a stage with an increased level of alertness and different types of surrounding stimuli may elicit a stronger arousal response than normally, not just those directly related to the new baby. The gating and the mechanisms of further processing of stimulus information were not different in mothers from controls and seemed to guarantee normal control of stimulus-elicited cognitive load in early motherhood.