Dancing Comes Naturally to Babies, Study Says

By Bridget Tyler on March 16th, 2010

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A new study shows that human infants are naturally predisposed to, well, dance.  And the better their sense of rhythm, the happier they are.

This study of 120 infants between the ages of 5 months and 2 years old, found that its subjects reacted strongly and rhythmically in response to music. “Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than the other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants,” says researcher Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York in England.  ”We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled.”

To test baby’s reactions to music, researchers played recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants and videotaped the results. They also brought in professional ballet dancers to analyze how well the babies were moving to the music.  To keep the babies’ parents from influencing them, they were given headphones to make sure they couldn’t hear the music and unthinkingly move with it.

Though this new research has shown that the ability to move to a rhythmic beat is innate in humans, researchers still have no idea why.  ”It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition,” Zentner said.  ”One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing.”

Zentner and Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla, in Finland, published their findings in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Click here to see their subjects rocking to the beat.