Children: they predict what will happen

The University of Padua declares that I children of as little as 4 months can anticipate an event, depending on the sound they feel. A voice is able to activate the neural circuits associated with seeing faces a second before they appear.

When perceiving sounds and seeing images, our brain does not spend all its time processing physical features and associated meanings. Only a small proportion do this, because the remaining 95% of the brain is busy making predictions about future events in the environment. They are then compared to reality to refute the truth or not. At what age can you though? to predict future episodes in the environment in relation to personal perceptions? Here the team from the University of Padua tried to provide an answer.

Known in the literature as the predictive brain, this continuous cycle of prediction-verification updates defines the subtle balance that governs the interface between our inner world and everything outside of us. In this study, brain activity was reconstructed in three classes of subjects, adults, 9-month-old children, and 4-month-old infants, from their cortical electrical activity (EEG) during the presentation of faces or objects preceded by a human voice or of, respectively. non-human sounds. The results suggest that even in the 4-month-old group there is a neural activation that reflects the ability to anticipate the event depending on the sound heard. In other words, the simple sound of a human voice is able to activate the neural circuits involved in the visual perception of faces about a second before they appear on a screen.

Giovanni Mento of the department, professor of psychology at the University of Padua and first author of the study

This early competence is a fundamental condition in human development to immediately guarantee the possibility of communicating with other similar persons.

Teresa Farroni, professor who supervised the research project