Parent–child couples display shared neural fingerprints while listening to stories

Abstract

Neural fingerprinting is a method to identify individuals from a group of people. Here, we established a new connectome-based identification model and used diffusion maps to show that biological parent–child couples share functional connectivity patterns while listening to stories. These shared fingerprints enabled the identification of children and their biological parents from a group of parents and children. Functional patterns were evident in both cognitive and sensory brain networks. Defining “typical” shared biological parent–child brain patterns may enable predicting or even preventing impaired parent–child connections that develop due to genetic or environmental causes. Finally, we argue that the proposed framework opens new opportunities to link similarities in connectivity patterns to behavioral, psychological, and medical phenomena among other populations. To our knowledge, this is the first study to reveal the neural fingerprint that represents distinct biological parent–child couples.