The origins of dance: Characterizing the development of infants’ earliest dance behavior.

Abstract

Dance is a universal human behavior and a crucial component of human musicality. When and how does the motivation and tendency to move to music develop? How does this behavior change as a process of maturation and learning? We characterize infants’ earliest dance behavior, leveraging parents’ extensive at-home observations of their children. Parents of infants aged 0–24 months (N = 278, 82.7% White, 84.5% in the United States, 46.0% of household incomes ≥$100,000) were surveyed regarding their child’s current and earliest dance behavior (movement by the child, during music, that the parent considered dance), motor development, and their own infant-directed dance. We found that dance begins early: 90% of infants produced recognizable dance by 12.8 months, and the age of onset was not solely a function of motor development. Infants who produced dance did so often, on average almost every day. We also found that dance shows qualitative developmental change over the first 2 years, rather than remaining stable. With motor development, age, and more time dancing, infants used a greater variety of movements in dance, and began to incorporate learned, imitated gestures (80% of infants by 17.9 months). 99.8% of parents reported dancing for or with their infants, raising questions about the role of infant-directed dance. These findings provide evidence that the motivation and tendency to move to music appears extremely early and that both learning and maturation lead to qualitative change in dance behavior during the first 2 years, informing broad questions about the origins of human musicality.

Early social communication through music: State of the art and future perspectives

“…Home studies were common in developmental psychology research from a few decades ago (Hart & Risley, 1992;Hops et al, 1987), but have reemerged in recent years along with new technologies for collecting complex real world data. These recent studies have used parents' extensive at-home observations and videos to show, for instance, that 90% of infants produce recognizable dancing behavior by their first year (Kim & Schachner, 2022). This finding nicely exemplifies how behaviors that might be difficult to elicit in an unfamiliar lab setting, such as spontaneous dancing, can be examined through home studies (Tervaniemi, 2023).…”

Pilot Studies on Empathy and Closeness in Mutual Entrainment/Improvisation vs. Formalised Dance with Different Types of Rhythm (Regular, Irregular, and No Rhythm) and Coupling (Visual, Haptic, Full Coupling): Building a Case for the Origin of Dance in Mutual Entrainment Empathic Interactions in the Mother–Infant Dyad

“…Most infants begin to produce dance behaviour at about 12 months old, and by their second year of life, they begin to show degrees of cognitive control (e.g., by incorporating learned movement patterns in their dance) [16]. Almost all parents dance with their children during this time.…”

Love songs and serenades: a theoretical review of music and romantic relationships

“…This has been extended to suggest that rhythm processing in particular, may develop from experiencing one’s mother walking in-utero ( Larsson et al, 2019 ). From birth, infant-directed song and dance become important tools for directing infant attention and for parent-infant bonding ( Feldman, 2007 ; Nguyen et al, 2023 ), as is infant-directed dance ( Kim and Schachner, 2023 ). The boundaries between music and language are blurred in these early-life interactions, as infant-directed speech is more melodic, rhythmic and ritualized than ordinary speech, making it much more music-like ( Dissanayake, 2004 ; Saint-Georges et al, 2013 ).…”