"Knocked" on the brain: experiment proves people have a sense of rhythm from birth
Rhythm perception is a distinct cognitive mechanism that starts from the earliest days of human life. This has been confirmed by a new study showing that infants can recognize rhythm. And it's not just due to their statistical learning ability.
How people's brains perceive, process and memorize music has long interested scientists. There is even a separate branch of cognitive science devoted to this topic - cognitive musicology. One of its representatives is a Dutch researcher, Professor Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam (Henkjan Honing).
In his previous work, in 2009, Honing, together with other experts in psychology, neurobiology and cognitive sciences from several research centers and universities in Hungary and the Netherlands, found clear signs that infants hear rhythm - the evenly repeated "beat" in music. This important property is thought to be essential for perceiving and creating music.
In a new study published in the journal Cognition, the scientists reinforced their discovery and found that infants' brains distinguish an orderly drum rhythm from an irregular sequence of beats.
The experiment took place at the Department of Obstetrics-Gynecology and Perinatal Intensive Care at the Military Hospital in Budapest, Hungary. Twenty-seven newborns (12 of them boys) whose mothers agreed to have their children participate in the study were involved.
Infants were given headphones to listen to two types of drum sounds. In the first case, the beats were isochronous, that is, they were repeated at regular intervals, which created a rhythmic pattern - the effect of pulsation or beating. In the second audio recording, similar drum beats were heard, but the intervals between them changed chaotically. As a result, there was no uniform rhythm, but the sequence of sounds could be remembered and recognized. Thus the scientists drew a line between the perception of rhythm and statistical learning, that is, the ability to identify patterns in the incoming information from the surrounding world.
During listening, the newborns were mostly asleep (87% of the time - quiet sleep, 11% of the time - active sleep). The infants' reactions were monitored using electroencephalography, which displays the electrical activity of the brain.
It turned out that the infants heard the rhythm if the intervals between drum beats were the same. When the intervals between beats varied unevenly, the infants' brains did not recognize the rhythm.
According to study co-author István Winkler, this crucial difference confirms that people's ability to hear rhythm is innate and not simply the result of memorizing sound sequences. The scientist also emphasized that the findings clearly show how important nursery rhymes and songs are for the development of babies' auditory perception.
Henkian Honing, for his part, called rhythm perception a fundamental human trait that probably played a crucial role in the evolution of human musical ability.