Newborn babies have got rhythm, according to study

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Thursday, 29th January 2009
Newborn babies can detect the beat in music, according to new research.

A study conducted at the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam found that babies as young as two or three days old can follow a rhythm.

This challenges previous theories that babies learn to detect beats in the first few months of their lives and suggests that the skill is innate or learned in the womb.

During the course of the study, 14 infants were monitored while listening to several versions of a basic rock rhythm, with strokes in both insignificant and important positions occasionally being omitted.

It was noted that when the rhythm was significantly interrupted an error message was sent by the babies' brains, signaling they had been expecting to hear something different.

"A baby's auditory system is working the same way as an adult's, in that it is always making predictions," lead researcher Istvan Winkler explains.

"If the prediction is incorrect, an error signal helps gauge how much you are off the actual target."

Last month, a survey by the Baby Website found that newborns are now more likely to hear popular tunes than traditional lullabies as mothers think it helps their infants fall to sleep better.