Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies
Presentation of a paper (Bainbridge & Bertolo et al., 2020, Nature Human Behaviour) that finds that infants are sensitive to the cross-culturally consistent features of lullabies, in that they relax to them even when the songs are drawn from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages by unfamiliar voices.
Programme
18:00 Mila Bertolo (PhD student of Neuroscience at McGill University)
Title: Infants relax in response to unfamiliar foreign lullabies
Abstract: In this talk, I will present a recent paper (Bainbridge & Bertolo et al., 2020, Nature Human Behaviour) that finds that infants are sensitive to the cross-culturally consistent features of lullabies, in that they relax to them even when the songs are drawn from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages by unfamiliar voices. Such findings highlight the importance of previous and continuing work done on building corpora of culturally diverse music. These findings speak to broader theories concerning the possible evolutionary basis of music.
Speaker biography: Mila Bertolo is a PhD student of Neuroscience at McGill University. She works on questions of how and why we understand music, drawing on developmental psychology, cross-cultural corpus work, and cross-species studies.
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Date: 3 May 2022 – Time: 18:00
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This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement N. 101004746