Once considered a uniquely human attribute, brain asymmetry has been proved to be ubiquitous among non-human animals. A synthetic review of evidence of animal lateralization in the motor, sensory, cognitive, and affective domains is provided, together with a discussion of its development and possible biological functions. It is argued that investigation of brain asymmetry in a comparative perspective may favor the link between classical neuropsychological studies and modern developmental and evolutionary biology approaches.
The question of whether preference for consonance is rooted in acoustic properties important to the auditory system or is acquired through enculturation has not yet been resolved. Two-month-old infants prefer consonant over dissonant intervals, but it is possible that this preference is rapidly acquired through exposure to music soon after birth or in utero. Controlled-rearing studies with animals can help shed light on this question because such studies allow researchers to distinguish between biological predispositions and learned preferences. In the research reported here, we found that newly hatched domestic chicks show a spontaneous preference for a visual imprinting object associated with consonant sound intervals over an identical object associated with dissonant sound intervals. We propose that preference for harmonic relationships between frequency components may be related to the prominence of harmonic spectra in biological sounds in natural environments.
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