Magnetoencephalographic Signatures of Conscious Processing Before Birth

Abstract

The concept of fetal consciousness is a widely discussed topic. In this study, we applied a hierarchical rule learning paradigm to investigate the possibility of fetal conscious processing during the last trimester of pregnancy. We used fetal magnetoencephalography, to assess fetal brain activity in 56 healthy fetuses between gestational week 25 and 40, during an auditory oddball paradigm containing first- and second-order regularities. The comparison of fetal brain responses towards standard and deviant tones revealed that fetuses show signs of hierarchical rule learning, and thus the formation of a memory trace for the second-order regularity. This ability develops over the course of the last trimester of gestation, in accordance with processes in physiological brain development. On the whole, our results support the assumption that fetuses are capable of consciously processing stimuli that reach them from outside the womb.

Visceral afferent training in action: The origins of agency in early cognitive development

“…Such mastery over rhythmic visceral dynamics is proposed to lay the foundations for the expression of more advanced forms of cognitive development (e.g., by facilitating the regulation of attentional resources such that statistical regularities can be extracted from auditory inputs experienced during the third trimester; cf. Moser et al, 2021;Saffran & Kirkham, 2018).…”