Remember all those adorable YouTube videos featuring babies dancing with wild abandon to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)?”
Well, a scientific study out of Europe says those tots were just following their instinct.
New research recently published in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that infants are likely born with the ability to move rhythmically to the music. In other words, babies are born to boogie. The findings, based on a study of 120 infants between 5 months and 2 years old, showed that babies respond to music even more than they do to speech.
“Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants,” Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York in England and one of two lead researchers, told LiveScience. “We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled.”
To test this theory, researchers had babies sit on a parent’s lap while they played classic music, rhythmic beats and speech to the tots and videotaped the results. While the babies were seated on their mothers’ laps during the experiments, the mothers wore headphones so that they couldn’t hear the music and affect their baby’s reaction to it.
They discovered that the kiddos moved their arms, legs, torsos and noggins much more when the music played versus when they heard people talking.
So what exactly does all this mean, besides the fact that the winner of next season’s America’s Best Dance Crew might not be potty trained yet? Researchers admit they’re not exactly sure.
“It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition,” Zentner said. “One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing.”
But whatever the reason, one fact is indisputable: dancing babies are awfully cute.
Photo by via Irish Philadelphia Photo Essays via Flickr.