As adults, picking out a specific conversation in a busy environment is a remarkable feat. The brain filters out the sounds that “belong together” from a jumble of simultaneous noise and separates them from everything else. But when does this ability begin? Does it require experience, language, or even conscious awareness, or is it present from birth?
This is precisely what researchers from Hungary, France, Italy, and Austria set out to investigate. They tested whether newborns, just a few days old and in deep sleep, can filter tonally coherent patterns from random background noise. The results of this study have now been published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Read the full article in German here
Publication
Polver S., Kovács P., Háden G. P., Sziller I., Winkler I., Tóth B. (2026). Evidence for temporal-coherence-based segregation of complex auditory scenes in the newborn human brain. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 20, 1719515.
DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2026.1719515