Infants' Ability to Detect Speakers in Noise Explored
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered that infants possess an evolutionarily conserved ability to use spatial cues to isolate voices in noisy environments. While infants and adults both use this mechanism, brain imaging shows that infants utilize more confined cortical activity compared to adults.
In noisy environments, organisms differentiate sounds they want to detect from interfering noise to improve their perception of target sounds. This process is widely conserved across species, including birds, crocodiles, ferrets, and human adults. But how early in life does this ability emerge? In a new JNeurosci paper, Farhin Ahmed, Qianxun Zheng, and colleagues at the University of Washington explored whether infants also use this evolutionarily conserved mechanism for detecting sounds in noisy environments.
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