Timing in the baby brain

Newborns discriminate novel from harmonic sounds: A study using magnetoencephalography

“…It was suggested that this response may reflect a neonate analogue of the adult P3a component , which mirrors an orienting response (Picton, 1992). A positive deflection was also found comparing 10-month old infants and young adults in a timing oddball task (Brannon et al, 2004). The positivity peaked around 400 ms in infants and only at 650 ms in adults.…”

Electrophysiological Measures of Time Processing in Infant and Adult Brains: Weber's Law Holds

“…However, the MMN is also elicited in response to shortening in the temporal interval between stimuli, indicating that the MMN is not merely a result of new afferent neurons being activated (Näätänen, Jiang, Lavikainen, Reinikainen, & Paavilainen, 1993). In our previous study, we demonstrated that 10-monthold infants exhibited an MMN in response to a threefold deviation in a temporal interval between tones that was similar to that of adults (Brannon et al, 2004; see also Trainor, Samuel, Desjardins, & Sonnadara, 2001;Nordby, Roth, & Pfefferbaum, 1988 with adults).…”

“…In looking-time behavioral datasets with human infants, scalar variance has been inferred from a pattern of successes and failures in samples of infants tested at different ratios (e.g., Lipton & Spelke, 2003;Xu & Spelke, 2000). ERP datasets could potentially provide neural activity measures, which could enable a psychophysical analysis whereby the amplitude of a component could 1 Note that although most prior studies of the MMN elicited by duration deviants have used stimulus durations in the tens to a few hundred milliseconds range (e.g., Jacobsen & Schröger, 2003;Sable et al, 2003;Jaramillo et al, 2000), there are now several reports in the literature of MMN effects to deviations that occur in the multiple hundreds of milliseconds to seconds range (e.g., Brannon et al, 2004;Näätänen, Syssoeva, & Takegata, 2004). These findings for longer durations are important for establishing the validity of the present design, which employs ISIs that range from 375 to 1500 msec, because earlier work had suggested that when the ISI exceeds a putative temporal window of integration, an MMN to a deviant interval is not elicited (Kujala, Kallio, Tervaniemi, & Näätänen, 2001;Yabe, Tervaniemi, Reinikainen, & Näätänen, 1997). vary as a function of the ratio of two temporal intervals, and might additionally provide insight into the level of brain processing by which such analyses might occur.…”

“…In a previous study, we used the ERP component known as the mismatch negativity (MMN) to study the brain responses of 10-month-old infants to deviations in temporal intervals (Brannon, Wolfe Roussel, Meck, & Woldorff, 2004). The MMN is a negative polarity waveform that usually peaks between 120 and 200 msec after the onset of the deviance (Näätänen & Winkler, 1999) and is often presented as the difference wave resulting from subtraction of the ERP elicited by the standard stimulus from the ERP response elicited by the deviant stimulus.…”

Components of the Language-Ready Brain

“…These studies show that in the first months of age, infants are sensitive and can orient their attention in time following regular patterns. vanMarle and Wynn (2006) reported that 6-month-old infants can discriminate event durations between 2 and 4 s. Brannon et al (2004Brannon et al ( , 2008 additionally showed that 10-month-old infants can detect changes in temporal rhythm by detecting a temporal deviation in a stream of tones formed by a regular inter-stimulus interval. In terms of infants' ability to benefit from rhythmic and regular patterns, their behavior is similar to that observed in adult research (Large and Jones, 1999;Barnes and Jones, 2000;Sanabria et al, 2011).…”