Beats affect sound processing at birth

Abstract: Rhythm in its simplest form is a series of stressed and unstressed regular pulses. For humans, rhythm perception is a basic and arguably automatic mechanism functional from birth, which underlies music and possibly speech perception. We have tested whether newborns discriminate accented and unaccented positions based on serial contextual cues and how accentuation affects the processing of deviant stimuli at these positions. The result provides new insights into the role of attention in beat perception.

Bio: Gábor Háden obtained his Ph.D. in Psychology from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in 2011. His thesis concerned the EEG correlates of perceptual abilities underlying music perception in newborn infants under the supervision of István Winkler. Between 2011 and 2014 he studied beat perception as a postdoc in Henkjan Honing’s lab at the University of Amsterdam. Currently he works at the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology in Budapest on EEG predictors of language development and beat perception.