Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Nat Hum Behav. 2021 Feb;5(2):256-264. doi: 10.1038/s41562-020-00963-z. Epub 2020 Oct 19.
Music is characterized by acoustic forms that are predictive of its behavioural functions. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. This property could reflect a function of listeners' experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. Here, we show that US infants (N = 144) relax in response to eight unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry and electrodermal activity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting that the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. The infants' parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures.
音乐的特点是其声学形式可以预测其行为功能。例如，成年听众仅根据音乐特征就能准确地将不熟悉的摇篮曲识别为针对婴儿的。这种特性可能反映了听众的经验、人类思维的基本设计或两者兼而有之。在这里，我们通过心率、瞳孔测量和皮肤电活动来显示，相对于来自其他外国社会的匹配非摇篮曲歌曲，美国婴儿（N=144）会对八首不熟悉的外国摇篮曲放松，这表明这种反应不是他们音乐经验的功能，而他们的音乐经验相对成年人来说是有限的。婴儿的父母压倒性地选择摇篮曲作为他们用来安抚烦躁婴儿的歌曲，尽管他们不熟悉。这些发现表明，婴儿可能倾向于对不同文化中常见的摇篮曲特征做出反应。
