Researchers investigated how listening to music in a social environment could impact infants' cognitive ability and neural processing. The small study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences medical journal studied 39 infants at 9 months of age. They found that the 20 infants who had gone through all 12 music sessions already had increased activity in the areas of the brain associated with auditory function. The music "intervention improves infants detection and prediction of auditory patterns, skills important to music and speech," the researchers concluded in their study.
