Babies

Infants prefer live music over recorded version, study finds

lanthierj — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 19:22:00 +0000

Infants prefer live music over recorded version, study finds

lanthierj Mon, 07/17/2023 - 15:22

Cutline

Research found that babies' heart rates synchronized and they were more engaged when watching live music, compared to a recording of the same performance (photo by Envato Elements)

Alexa Battler

Topic

Breaking Research

Babies

Child Development

Connaught Fund

Music

NSERC

Psychology

Research & Innovation

University of Toronto Scarborough

Subheadline

New research from U of T's TEMPO Lab suggests that even babies feel the impact of being at a live show, through both musicians’ interactions with an audience and the social experience of being in a crowd

You don't have to be an adult to feel the power of live opera – even babies prefer to attend in person, a new study suggests.

When infants watched a live performance of a baby opera, their heart rates synchronized and they were significantly more engaged than babies who watched an identical recording of the show, researchers say.

Laura Cirelli (supplied image)

“Their heart rates were speeding up and slowing down in a similar fashion to other babies watching the show,” says Laura Cirelli, assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and co-author of a new study published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.

“Those babies were dealing with all these distractions in the concert hall, but still had these uninterrupted bursts of attention.”

The findings suggest that even babies feel the impact of being at a live show, through both musicians’ interactions with an audience and the social experience of being in a crowd. Cirelli recalls moments during the performance when a calm would sweep over the babies, and other times when a change in pitch or vocal riff would excite them all.

She says this may offer insights into why humans are hardwired to consume music and attend live shows.

“If there’s something happening that we collectively are engaging with, we’re also connecting with each other. It speaks to the shared experience,” says Cirelli, director of the TEMPO Lab, which studies how infants and children respond to music.

“The implication is that this is not necessarily specific to this one performance. If there’s these moments that capture us, then we are being captured together.”

It’s well established that socialization is crucial during early childhood development – an infant’s brain is laying the groundwork for future life skills and abilities as it grows. Cirelli says music can play a powerful part in making those important bonds. She points to research finding infants are more likely to socialize with someone after hearing them sing a familiar song or dancing to music with them, and that infants have strong emotional reactions to music and song even before their first birthday.

“We consistently find that music can be a highly social and emotional context within which infants can foster connections to their caregivers, other family members and even new acquaintances,” she says. “This audience study shows that even in a community context, infants are engaging with the music and connecting to their fellow audience members.”

Babies watched a selection of songs from The Music Box, an operatic performance designed for infants
(submitted photo)

For the study, researchers examined 120 babies ages six to 14 months as they watched a children’s opera performed at a concert hall that doubles as a research facility at McMaster University (61 babies watched in person, while the other 59 watched a recorded version).

Researchers meticulously broadcast the recording so that the performers were at the same size, distance and volume as the live version. The babies’ responses were tracked through heart monitors and tablets mounted on the backs of concert seats. Later, student research assistants combed through the footage to note when babies looked at the stage and when they looked away.

The live performance captured the babies' attention for 72 per cent of the 12-minute show while the recording held their attention for 54 per cent of the time. The live show also had infants continuously watching for longer bouts of time.

“Even little babies who may or may not have experienced music in a community context before are already engaging more when it’s delivered this way,” Cirelli says.

“That’s one question we have as music cognition researchers: What is it about the live experience that's worth it? Why would people go if there’s not something fundamental about that live music experience that's above and beyond listening to music by yourself?”

That’s not to say babies find virtual performances boring. After the onset of the pandemic, the researchers virtually studied one group of babies as they watched the same recording in their homes over Zoom. Those babies paid about as much attention as the ones who attended the live show – watching about 64 per cent on average – but they were more likely to become distracted and have shorter bursts of attention.

“The babies watching at home didn’t have the distraction of being in a new place – they were in their comfort zone,” Cirelli says. "But even without distractions, the quality of their attention was still not nearly as strong as the audience in the live condition.”

The study – which was co-authored by former TEMPO Lab postdoctoral researcher Haley Kragness, now an assistant professor at Bucknell University – will also feed into some of Cirelli’s other work.

In a different study, she and a team of researchers are exploring whether a live performance over Zoom has the same impact on engagement as a live performance in person, and whether musicians’ interactions with an audience can play a similarly powerful role in capturing attention.

Yet another study will investigate whether live performances affect their memory of the event and how watching a live performance versus a recorded version affects how they feel about the performer.

“If a baby is frequently brought to these kinds of events, will that shape their foundation for engaging in music and the community later in childhood?” Cirelli asks.

“It speaks to why we even engage with music at all.”

The study was funded by the U of T Connaught New Researcher Award and by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Understanding babies' minds: U of T researcher examines how infants learn language

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 20:56:41 +0000

Understanding babies' minds: U of T researcher examines how infants learn language

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 09/15/2021 - 16:56

Cutline

Researchers in Elizabeth Johnson's U of T Mississauga lab track babies' motor responses and where they look for insights into how they learn language, but will soon be able to measure brain activity, too (photo by Drew Lesiuczok)

Topic

Research & Innovation

U of T Mississauga

For more than 20 years, the University of Toronto’s Elizabeth Johnson has studied the ways babies and children acquire language: How do children begin learning the meaning of words? How do they cope with unfamiliar languages and voices? How do they learn language so quickly?

Now, with the support of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund, the professor of psychology and director of the Child Language and Speech Studies (CLASS) Lab at U of T Mississauga has the chance to delve deeper into the mysteries of language acquisition by effectively tapping into the minds of infants as young as six months old.

While Johnson’s team focused on more traditional behavioural measures such as eye-tracking, looking time and motor responses in her CLASS lab, her new Baby Brain and Behaviour Lab (BaBBL) will carry out event-related potential (ERP) studies to better understand how children acquire language. ERPs are an electrophysiological measure reflecting the brain’s activity in response to specific stimulus or events in the world. The researchers will use electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure infants’ neural response to speech sounds and words.

“It’s all really exciting because we haven’t been able to do ERP work in my lab, so it’s going to be a whole new lab component,” says Johnson, adding the procedure is safe and well-established for use in infants. “With this new tool, we will have a more complete window into the initial workings of the human mind.”

As Johnson and her team study what’s happening in infants’ brains, they will also be able to physically observe reactions and behaviours.

“The ERP measure will allow us to actually see how the brain is responding to words when they hear them, so I will be able to look at how neural responses line up with behavioural responses that we observe,” Johnson explains.

Researchers will examine how infants’ brains respond to words through the ERP measurements. The babies will then return multiple times, at different ages, so researchers can monitor changes over the years.

“By analyzing changes in those responses over time, we can learn a lot about what children are picking up on in the world,” Johnson says. “And, we can look at the way their brain responds to different words early on in development at six months of age, and how that might predict how well they’re speaking, and how many words they’ll know when they’re a toddler or when they’re older.”

She adds that researchers will also look at the ways caregivers interact with their children, and how it might impact children's neural response to the words they hear. For example, the research team will record and analyze caregivers’ different interaction styles to see how they support children's language development.

Johnson says it’s important to study how children learn language in linguistically diverse environments since many Toronto children grow up in households that speak a language other than English (photo by Drew Lesiuczok)

With the help of her Canada Research Chair grant, Johnson will also study how children learn language in linguistically-diverse environments – a reality for many children in the GTA.

She says more children today are growing up in households that speak a language other than English, meaning they are learning more than one language and hearing different accents.

One eventual application of her work could be to predict reading and speech difficulties in children – especially in linguistically-diverse populations.

“Traditionally, infant research has been largely focused on children learning one language,” Johnson says. “But many – if not most – of the children in the world are learning more than one language, and being exposed to more than one language variety.

“If we want to understand how language acquisition and speech development works in the real world, we have to study how children learn language in linguistically-diverse environments.”

Babies and sleep: U of T expert shares her tips for bleary-eyed parents

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 22:11:40 +0000

Babies and sleep: U of T expert shares her tips for bleary-eyed parents

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 03/02/2021 - 17:11

Cutline

(photo by Danielle Reid/EyeEm via Getty Images)

Rebecca Biason

Topic

Our Community

Babies

Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing

Mount Sinai Hospital

Sleep

Getting enough sleep with an infant can seem elusive at best. Yet, while we would all like to have more sleep, many new parents simply resign themselves to an exhausted state, seeing it as a rite of passage.

Robyn Stremler suggests a different approach.

“Sleep is important – not just for cognition and mood, but also for the physiological mechanisms of the body, like blood sugar regulation and metabolism, and infants reap those benefits as well,” says Stremler an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Lawrence S. Bloomberg Faculty of Nursing and an adjunct scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children.

To get babies to sleep, Stremler says try to maintain a consistent bedtime routine and a cool, quiet and dark sleep environment. She adds that parents and older children will benefit from this approach, too.

As a member of the Pediatric Sleep Council, a group of international pediatric sleep clinicians and researchers, Stremler this week took part in an event for Baby Sleep Day, recognized internationally as part of an initiative to raise awareness about the importance of sleep even for the youngest members of society.

Stremler has conducted research into nurse-led interventions during the early post-partum period as well as ongoing research projects that look at improving sleep for families who have children and babies in the neonatal intensive care unit and pediatric intensive care unit and who are undergoing treatment for cancer. She also runs infant sleep workshops through the Sinai Health System, where she teaches expectant parents about the importance of sleep during the postpartum period.

To raise further awareness about the significance of sleep and in light of the challenges many parents are facing during the pandemic, Stremler recently shared her expertise with writer Rebecca Biason.

Why is it so hard to get babies to sleep?

A lot of parents I have worked with know they are going to miss out on sleep, but they do not know what is normal and, often for new parents, they do not know what to expect. Infants’ sleep changes so much over the first year, particularly in how their sleep is organized. We know infants’ circadian rhythms start to move sleep more into the nighttime at around three months of age, but one of the biggest challenges with infant sleep is that every day can be different.

Growth spurts can really disrupt sleep and they tie into more night feedings, or cluster feedings for a parent who is breastfeeding. Pain and discomfort from teething can also be another issue that impacts sleep. We also find that when an infant is sleeping it is tempting for parents to want to use that time to get work done instead of prioritizing sleep.

During my research study investigating a nurse-led intervention to improve sleep during the postpartum period, we talked with parents about the importance of their sleep because it really is as much of a priority. When some of these challenges around infant sleep happen night after night, it can be easy for parents who are sleep deprived to get into negative thought patterns. Whether you have children or not, everyone can relate to the feeling of not having enough sleep. Not only is your mood and cognitive function impaired, but how you interact with others is impacted, and this also has links to postpartum depression (PPD).

What are some tips and strategies?

In my prenatal classes, I encourage expecting families to talk with each other and prepare in advance a plan for how they are going to access resources when the going gets tough. This also includes learning to recognize signs of postpartum depression, as it can affect not only the birth parent but supporting partners as well. It is hard when you are in the thick of things to know when to reach out for help.

I suggest working through a plan before birth that includes identifying who your health-care provider is and how to contact them if PPD signs start to appear. Also consider who in your support network is available to call on to deliver meals to the porch or diapers to the door, even if they cannot help you in person. I also ask parents to plan for how they will take care of themselves. If your partner is able to be at home with you during the pandemic, prioritize something restful for yourself.

It is important to remember that sleep is a behaviour. One of the things I suggest for new parents is to be as consistent as possible with infant sleep, including setting up an environment and a routine that is conducive to sleep. This can help decrease the number of sleep interruptions for infants as young as six or 12 weeks old.

To set the tone for sleep, create a brief enjoyable bedtime routine that your infant can rely on. This can include a cuddle and a song or a story just before they go to sleep.

Keep the sleep environment cool, dark and quiet. This is important for parents and children of all ages.

Remember that sleep is not a competitive sport and there will be blips in the road, but give yourself flexibility and a reminder that it will pass. I often remind parents not to compare themselves or get caught up in how someone else’s infant is sleeping. You have to do what feels right for your baby and your family. I encourage parents to look at other markers of good sleep like if your baby is happy during the day and growing well.

How has the pandemic impacted sleep for parents and children?

I think there has been a bit of mix in how the pandemic has affected sleep. There are a good chunk of people reporting difficulty with sleeping due to anxiety or stress, including not having the same access to a support network of family and friends that they might have had pre-pandemic.

As for parents of older children, increased screen time due to remote learning and less activity overall has also likely had a negative impact on sleep.

At the same time, the increased flexibility around remote learning and working from home for parents has shifted bedtime and wake-up schedules. For children who had difficulty with falling asleep at bedtime or struggled to get up in the morning before the pandemic, their families have found improved sleep with more relaxed schedules and decreased commutes.

Everything works better when you have more sleep, so prioritizing it as much as possible and doing things to help yourself and your child – even in the midst of the challenging time we are living in – can provide real benefits.

Racial bias may begin in babies at six months, U of T research reveals

ullahnor — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 17:01:37 +0000

Racial bias may begin in babies at six months, U of T research reveals

ullahnor Tue, 04/11/2017 - 13:01

Cutline

Professor Kang Lee says lack of exposure to other races may be the cause of racial bias in babies (photo from Shutterstock)

Lindsey Craig

Author legacy

Lindsey Craig

Topic

U of T Professor Kang Lee says two of his recent studies indicate that racial bias may arise in babies as young as six to nine months of age.

Lee, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says that lack of exposure to other races may be the cause.

He and researchers from the University of Toronto, the U.S., U.K., France and China, show that six to nine month olds demonstrate racial bias in favour of members of their own race and racial bias against those of other races.

In the first study, published in Developmental Science, Lee showed that six- to nine-month-old babies begin to associate faces from their own race with happy music and those from other races with sad music.

In the second study, published in Child Development, the researchers found that babies as young as six months were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race, rather than from an adult of a different race.

“The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child’s first year,” said Lee, a Canada Research Chair in moral development and developmental neuroscience and lead author of the studies. “This challenges the popular view that race-based bias first emerges only during the preschool years.”

He believes the results of these studies are important given the issues of widespread racial bias and racism around the world.

“These findings thus point to the possibility that racial bias may arise out of our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy,” Lee said. “If we can pinpoint the starting point of racial bias, which we may have done here, we can start to find ways to prevent racial biases from happening.”

Researchers say these findings are important because they offer a new perspective on the cause of race-based bias.

“When we consider why someone has a racial bias, we often think of negative experiences he or she may have had with other-race individuals. But these findings suggest that a race-based bias emerges without experience with other-race individuals,” said Naiqi (Gabriel) Xiao, who also led research for the two studies and now is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.

This can be inferred because prior studies from other labs have indicated that over 90 per cent of people many infants typically interact with are of their own race. Following this pattern, the current studies involved babies who had little to no prior experience with other-race individuals.

“An important finding is that infants will learn from people they are most exposed to,” said Xiao, indicating that parents can help prevent racial bias by introducing their children to people from a variety of races.

Lee said it’s important to be mindful of the impact racial bias has on our everyday lives, stressing that not only is explicit bias a concern but so too are implicit forms.

“Implicit racial biases tend to be subconscious, pernicious, and insidious,” he said. “It permeates almost all of our social interactions, from health care to commerce, employment, politics, and dating. Because of that, it’s very important to study where these kinds of biases come from and use that information to try and prevent racial biases from developing,” he said.

What happens to your brain when a baby cries?

lanthierj — Thu, 19 May 2016 15:46:10 +0000

What happens to your brain when a baby cries?

lanthierj Thu, 05/19/2016 - 11:46

Cutline

(photo by Yoshihide Nomura via flickr)

Don Campbell

Author legacy

Don Campbell

Topic

Subheadline

That heartrending sound may be teaching parents how to “focus their attention more selectively”

A baby’s cry not only commands our attention, it also rattles our executive functions – the very neural and cognitive processes we use for making everyday decisions, according to a new University of Toronto study.

“Parental instinct appears to be hardwired, yet no one talks about how this instinct might include cognition,” says David Haley, co-author and associate professor of psychology at U of T Scarborough.

“If we simply had an automatic response every time a baby started crying, how would we think about competing concerns in the environment or how best to respond to a baby’s distress?”

The study looked at the effect infant vocalizations –in this case audio clips of a baby laughing or crying – had on adults completing a cognitive conflict task. The researchers used the Stroop task, in which participants were asked to rapidly identify the color of a printed word while ignoring the meaning of the word itself. Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) during each trial of the cognitive task, which took place immediately after a two-second audio clip of an infant vocalization.

The brain data revealed that the infant cries reduced attention to the task and triggered greater cognitive conflict processing than the infant laughs. Cognitive conflict processing is important because it controls attention – one of the most basic executive functions needed to complete a task or make a decision, notes Haley, who runs U of T’s Parent-Infant Research Lab.

“Parents are constantly making a variety of everyday decisions and have competing demands on their attention,” says Joanna Dudek, a graduate student in Haley’s Parent-Infant Research lab and lead author on the study.

“They may be in the middle of doing chores when the doorbell rings and their child starts to cry. How do they stay calm, cool and collected, and how do they know when to drop what they’re doing and pick up the child?”

A baby’s cry has been shown to cause aversion in adults, but it could also be creating an adaptive response by “switching on” the cognitive control parents use in effectively responding to their child’s emotional needs while also addressing other demands in everyday life, adds Haley.

“If an infant’s cry activates cognitive conflict in the brain, it could also be teaching parents how to focus their attention more selectively,” he says.

“It’s this cognitive flexibility that allows parents to rapidly switch between responding to their baby’s distress and other competing demands in their lives – which, paradoxically, may mean ignoring the infant momentarily.”

The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that infants occupy a privileged status in our neurobiological programming, one deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. But, as Haley notes, it also reveals an important adaptive cognitive function in the human brain.

The study, which is the first to examine the effects of infant vocalizations on adult neural activity during a cognitive task, will be published in the journal PLOS ONE. Marc Bornstein, a senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was also a co-author. The study received funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

Haley says the next steps for the research will be to look at whether there are individual differences in the neural activation of attention and conflict processing in new mothers that may help or hinder their capacity to respond sensitively to their own infant’s cry.

(Visit flickr to see the original of the photo used above)

Babies

Infants prefer live music over recorded version, study finds

Understanding babies' minds: U of T researcher examines how infants learn language

Babies and sleep: U of T expert shares her tips for bleary-eyed parents

Racial bias may begin in babies at six months, U of T research reveals

Read more about Lee's research

What happens to your brain when a baby cries?