Very young children are much better than adults at learning music. As this ScienCentral News video explains, this music lesson gives new insight as to how we learn.
Young Specialists
Even as children, we find that certain things just come easier or are more important to us. It's a type of specialization that is an element in creating who we will become as adults.
But research now indicates that some specialization happens very early in life. In research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Erin Hannon found such a specialization in the area of music and rhythms. She says, "At six months infants respond to familiar and unfamiliar rhythms -- so, rhythms from their own culture, and other cultures -- equally well. By 12 months however, we find that infants have a very culture-specific way of responding to rhythms."
Erin Hannon
Studies like this are shedding light into infants' early learning patterns in a number of areas, not just music. Hannon says, "We see it in language, in sort of speech perception; we see it in perception of faces." She adds, "Perhaps, for a number of different things infants have highly flexible ways of responding to the world. And they are very rapid learners. And this ability to learn may change as we get older. The questions about why this changes are complex. It could be sort of a critical period type of effect."
Hannon adds that it appears that even at ages of around a year, we are already filtering out information, adding, "It may arise from the fact that as we acquire more and more knowledge, we've already shaped the way that our brains deal with information. And so when we try to introduce new things there's sort of more resistance. And so this makes it more difficult to change the basic ways that we respond to things."
How did Hannon and the University of Toronto's Sandra Trehub go about learning an infant's music preference? Since other studies have shown that infants will stare slightly longer at something that is unfamiliar, the researchers used this to evaluate their studies. In a quiet lab, the researchers would watch the infant's reaction as the infants watched TV monitors showing simple cartoons with various test music.
In a test similar to this, Hannon played unfamiliar rhythms to groups of children.
In one experiment, they found that 12 month-olds had difficulty with foreign-sounding rhythms from Eastern-Europe, but not with western-style rhythms. Hannon explains, "We wanted to find out ... how does this happen and when does learning sort of change as we develop?"
In a second experiment Hannon says they sent the infants and parents home with CD's of the Eastern-European music. She says, "They listened to those CD's for two weeks. We brought them back in the lab and we retested them and they showed renewed ability to perceive this sort of rhythmic structures in a foreign context."
Adults, however, are another issue. Hannon also tried the second experiment on them, sending them home with the CDs of foreign music and then testing their ability to discern disruptions. Hannon says, "We tried to do the same thing with adults, thinking we might be able to teach them, and they improved only minimally and they never got above chance. Which suggests that although they're getting the same basic kind of exposure that infants are, they're just not learning as much from it."
She says the studies show, "That as we become increasingly good at familiar structures, that sort of warps the way we respond to everything. And so when you introduce structures that don't conform to the ones we've already been learning, we sort of distort that as we listen."
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