Sensitivity to musical rhythm supports social development in infants

Summary: Singing to a baby helps support social development and interaction, researchers report.

Source: Vanderbilt University

Engaging babies with a song provides a ready means of supporting social development and interaction, according to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), Marcus Autism Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, and Emory University School of Medicine enrolled 112 infants who were either 2 months or 6 months old.

The study tracked the infants’ eye gazes moment-by-moment to show that the rhythm of the caregiver’s singing caused the infants’ eye gazes to synchronize or sub-second to the caregivers’ social cues Timescale is introduced.

Already at the age of 2 months, when babies first engage with others in an interactive way, babies were twice as likely to look at the singers’ eyes time-locked to the musical beat than would be expected by chance.

At the age of 6 months, when infants are highly experienced in face-to-face musical play and develop increasingly sophisticated rhythmic and communicative behaviors such as babbling, they were more than four times more likely to look at the eyes of the singers, in sync with the musical. beats.

“Singing to infants seems like a simple act, but it is full of rich and meaningful social information,” said study lead author Miriam Lense, Ph.D., assistant professor of otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC. “Here, we show that when caregivers sing to their infants, they intuitively structure their behavior to support social bonding and the infants.”

During the test, the researchers used eye-tracking technology to measure every movement of each baby’s eyes while they watched videos of people engaging them in song.

“For this study, we used videos of the singing rather than live singing to ensure that any change in the infant’s seeking behavior was due to the infant, and not that the singer was adapting to the infant,” Lense said. “Babies could look anywhere while watching the videos, but we found that their looking behavior was not random.”

“Critically, the predictable rhythm of singing is essential for this entrained social interaction. If we experimentally manipulate singing so that it no longer has a predictable rhythm, entrainment is disrupted and infants no longer successfully synchronize their eyes to the social cues of the caretaker,” she added.

The researchers confirmed their findings in another group of 6-month-old babies who watched both the original videos of the singing and videos that had been manipulated to jitter so that their rhythms were no longer predictable.

While the infants again displayed entrained eye gazes to the original videos when the singing was rhythmically predictable, this time-locked eye gaze effect was no longer present when the predictable rhythm was disrupted.

“This is important because it shows a remarkable physical coupling between caregiving behavior and infant experience,” said Warren Jones, Ph.D., senior author of the study and Nien Distinguished Chair in Autism at Emory University School of Medicine. “Without conscious awareness, something as simple and intuitive as caregiving song sets off a whole cascade of behavior and movement that changes the babies’ experiences.”

“Although what expressing a caregiver is important, when in the how they express social cues is particularly critical for child-caregiver communication,” added Lense. “Rhythmic predictability—a universal feature of song—is an integral mechanism for structuring social interactions and supporting children’s social development.”

Reyna Gordon, Ph.D., associate professor of otolaryngology and co-director of the Music Cognition Lab at VUMC, said the study highlights that making music is not just about entertainment: Making music is a core aspect of early socio-emotional development.

“It is remarkable that these infants essentially follow the beat of the music with their eyes by modulating their eye contact with the eyes of the singer around the beat (or pulsate) of singing,” said Gordon, who was not involved in the study.

“These findings represent a major step forward in our understanding of the extent to which very young children are sensitive to musical rhythm, suggesting that an aptitude for music is intertwined with early social engagement,” she added.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Mental Health, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders) and the GRAMMY Foundation.

Lense said her team has now extended the research to study synchronization in autism as part of the Sound Health Initiative, a partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts.