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2010-03-16 08:46:25
LiveScience Staff
LiveScience.com livescience Staff
livescience.com Mon Mar 15, 3:25 pm ET
Babies love a beat, according to a new study that found dancing comes naturally
to infants.
The research showed babies respond to the rhythm and tempo of music, and find
it more engaging than speech.
The findings, based on a study of 120 infants between 5 months and 2 years old,
suggest that humans may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in
response to music.
"Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the
music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants," said
researcher Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York in England.
"We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their
movements with the music, the more they smiled."
To test babies' dancing disposition, the researchers played recordings of
classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants, and videotaped the
results. They also recruited professional ballet dancers to analyze how well
the babies matched their movements to the music.
During the experiments, the babies were sitting on a parent's lap, though the
adults had headphones to make sure they couldn't hear the music and were
instructed not to move.
The researchers found the babies moved their arms, hands, legs, feet, torsos
and heads in response to the music, much more than to speech.
Though the ability appears to be innate in humans, the researchers aren't sure
why it evolved.
"It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular
predisposition," Zentner said. "One possibility is that it was a target of
natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that
just happens to be relevant for music processing."
Zentner and his colleague Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence
in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla, in Finland,
detailed their findings in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.