COGNITION IN PREGNANCY AND THE POSTPARTUM PERIOD COGNITIVE REORGANIZATION AND PROTECTIVE MECHANISMS IN PREGNANCY AND THE POSTPARTUM PERIOD By

In 2001 Brett and Baxendale reviewed cognitive change in pregnancy and concluded that although “...much has been written in an impressionistic way....at the beginning of the twenty first century considerable gaps in our knowledge remain” (pp. 339). Ten years later a clear picture describing cognitive change in women has still failed to emerge. Recent work investigating pregnancy-induced cognition in women continues to focus on memory deficits, in stark contrast to the cognitive advantage and neural plasticity described in the nonhuman (rat) literature. The following thesis reviews the current literature investigating pregnancy-induced cognitive change, and then reports three empirical studies investigating cognition in pregnant and postpartum women. I hypothesized that, given the high stakes associated with pregnancy and the postpartum period, adaptive mechanisms designed to keep the mother safe exist in the cognitive domain, in much the same way that Nausea and Vomiting in Pregnancy is now believed to buffer the mother and fetus from harm. The results of an updated meta-analysis and a longitudinal study comparing cognitive performance in pregnant and non-pregnant women suggest that there are cognitive costs associated with becoming a mother, in both pregnancy and the postpartum period. Recent research suggests that pregnant women possess an advantage in processing social stimuli: I report that pregnant women show facilitated recognition of faces. Finally, I examined nesting, and developed a questionnaire that tracked women through pregnancy and into the postpartum period, comparing non-pregnant women at similar time points. I report that nesting occurs in women, peaking in the third trimester, and involves space preparation and social