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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 "At nine months, they can tell individual happy pieces and sad pieces apart," he said. "It shows the remarkable cognitive skills that these kids have. They've mastered a lot in nine months -- 270 days."
The findings, expected to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Infant Behavior & Development, are "just another way of documenting that babies are very attuned very early in development to emotion," Flom said. "It helps them to learn communication and helps promote early language skills."
But, Flom added, the study says nothing about the value of music as a tool to help babies become smarter.
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Paul Sanberg, director of the University of South Florida College of Medicine's Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair, said the study authors have come up with a unique way to gauge what babies can perceive.
"If they [babies] have no language, you can't ask them," Sanberg said. "It's kind of like doing an animal experiment: You're trying to interpret what the subject is feeling or doing through nonverbal responses."
Flom said the next step in the research is to study whether babies can detect aggression -- or non-aggression -- in dogs.
"You and I don't require much training to know whether we should approach a dog and scratch it on the chin or back away pretty quickly," he said.
More information
Learn more about the brain's development from the University of Washington.
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