Music (warm) and speech (cool) responses in sleeping infants.
Preliminary evidence for selective cortical responses to music in one-month-old infants
Peer reviewed publication, Developmental Science
Summary
- Responses to music, speech, and control sounds matched for the spectrotemporal modulation-statistics of each sound were measured from 2- to 11-week-old sleeping infants using fMRI.
- Auditory cortex was significantly activated by these stimuli in 19 out of 36 sleeping infants.
- Selective responses to music compared to the three other stimulus classes were found in non-primary auditory cortex but not in nearby Heschl’s Gyrus.
- Selective responses to speech were not observed in planned analyses but were observed in unplanned, exploratory analyses.
Open Source Materials
All stimuli, code used to create stimuli and analyze the data, and data used to generate the figures are available in an OSF repository.
Sample Stimuli
- example of original music recording (not used in experiment)
- example excitation-matched speech stimulus (used in experiment)
- example excitation-matched music stimulus (used in experiment)
- example model-matched speech stimulus (used in experiment)
- example model-matched music stimulus (used in experiment)