Newborn babies can perceive the beat in music, study shows

Newborn babies can perceive the beat in music, new research has confirmed. The study, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the HUN-REN Research Center for Natural Sciences (TTK) in Hungary, shows that this ability to recognize a beat is not simply due to the statistical learning ability of newborns, but that beat perception is actually a separate cognitive mechanism that is already active at birth. The study was published on 27 November in the journal Cognition.