Sleeping babies learn in an eyeblink
One-month-olds catch winks to make language links
By Bruce Bower
Babies snooze through much of the first month after birth, but don’t call them lazy. One-month-olds doze to discover, with an emphasis on social insights, a new study suggests.
Snoozing infants learned to blink in response to three types of sounds, says psychologist Bethany Reeb-Sutherland of the University of Maryland, College Park, and her colleagues. Sleeping babies blinked more readily upon hearing a spoken voice than a tone or a recorded voice played backward, signaling an early aptitude for absorbing social information, the researchers report in a paper published online June 18 in Developmental Science.
“Although young infants spend much of their time sleeping, they continue to learn about the environment around them, particularly the social environment,” Reeb-Sutherland says.
These findings help to explain how infants come to recognize speech sounds within several months of birth, remarks psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier of Rutgers University in Piscataway, N.J. “From birth through at least 1 month of age, infants learn while they sleep — an ability that adults lack,” Rovee-Collier says.