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Infants can anticipate events based on sounds

08.08.2022

Infants as young as 4 months old can anticipate an event according to the sound heard as demonstrated in the study Face specific neural anticipatory activity in infants 4 and 9 months old.” Coordinated by the University of Padua and published in the journal Scientific Reports, the study uses human auditory cues to pre-activate the neural circuits involved in the visual perception of faces about a second before seeing them appear. It is the first scientific demonstration that infants can prepare themselves for the encounter of socially relevant stimuli.

Hypothesizing what the future holds allows us to optimize our mental and physical resources to react better and faster to events, thus increasing our chances of survival. It is not a matter of premonition, but of processes that are based on natural physical events such as the sensory regularity of some environmental stimuli (a musical rhythm or a repetitive movement) or the associative learning between situations that tend to occur together ( a "knock at the door” and the subsequent appearance of a face).

Prof Giovanni Mento of the Psychology Department of the University of Padua and the first author of the study explains, “Despite the significant importance of our predictive brain, no studies have investigated its development during the very first months of life. In this research, brain activity was reconstructed starting from their cortical electrical activity (EEG) in three classes of subjects; adults, 9-month-old infants and 4-month-old infants during which the presentation of faces or objects respectively was preceded by a human voice or from non-human sounds. The results suggest that even in the group of 4-month-olds there is a neural activation that reflects the ability to anticipate the event depending on the sound heard. In other words, the simple sound of a human voice can pre-activate the neural circuits involved in the visual perception of faces about a second before seeing them appear on a screen.”