#fnirs — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: July 26, 2026 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Newborn brains respond more strongly to crying than to speech, study finds

URL: https://www.psypost.org/newborn-brains-respond-more-strongly-to-crying-than-to-speech-study-finds/

A new study published in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience indicates that newborn babies show stronger brain responses to the sound of infant cries than to spoken sentences. The findings suggest that an infant’s biological ability to produce a specific sound may shape how their brain processes auditory information from the moment they are born. This discovery provides evidence that the biological link between vocal production and speech perception begins much earlier in human development than scientists previously assumed.

In adult human communication, listening to speech and producing vocal sounds are deeply interconnected processes. When adults hear language, the regions of the brain responsible for moving the mouth, tongue, and throat tend to activate alongside the regions that process hearing. Scientists refer to this interaction as the perception-production link, which allows individuals to compare the sounds they hear with the physical movements needed to recreate them.

Human infants enter the world with sophisticated listening abilities despite their inability to speak words. Expectant mothers pass speech sounds through the uterine wall, allowing fetuses to hear language starting around the twentieth to twenty-fourth week of pregnancy. Because of this early exposure, newborns show a strong preference for listening to human speech over many other environmental noises.

Spoken language represents an acoustically complex signal that infants have heard for months before birth. Infant crying, on the other hand, is a simpler sound that babies only begin hearing after they enter the world. However, crying is unique because it is the only communicative sound that newborn babies are physically capable of generating on their own.

To explore how early physical capabilities influence auditory development, researchers evaluated whether newborns process cries in a manner similar to speech. Judit Gervain, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Padua and a senior research scientist at the Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center in Paris, detailed the rationale behind the study. She noted that an expanding body of research indicates that even before babies can speak, they remain sensitive to the movements of their mouth and tongue, which can shape how they process sounds.

“In other words, their growing abilities to produce speech go hand in hand with their abilities to perceive speech,” Gervain explained. “We wanted to test how early this production-perception link begins, and since the earliest communicative sounds babies can make are cries, indeed, the very first sounds a newborn infant makes immediately at birth are cries, we decided to test how babies perceive cries and whether it is similar to how they perceive speech.”

To test this idea, researchers examined twenty-five healthy full-term newborn infants who had been exposed to the French language during pregnancy. The group included fifteen females and ten males, with an average age of approximately two days old, ranging from one to four days. The infants had an average gestational age of thirty-nine weeks and six days, with a mean birth weight of 3,320 grams and strong health scores at birth.

An additional forty-five infants participated in the experiment but were excluded from the final analysis due to movement, crying, or technical issues. A major reason for this high exclusion rate involves a natural reaction known as emotional contagion, which occurs when newborns become distressed and start crying upon hearing the sound of other infants crying. The researchers also tested twenty-seven adult native Italian speakers who had no prior knowledge of the French language.

The research team measured brain activity using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, a non-invasive imaging technology often abbreviated as fNIRS. This technique uses caps fitted with special lights and sensors to measure changes in blood oxygen levels through the skull. When specific brain regions become active, they consume more oxygen, allowing sensors to track neural responses across the frontal, temporal, and parietal areas of the brain.

The auditory stimuli consisted of cry recordings from ten French newborns and spoken French sentences recorded by ten adult French women. Each cry sound was paired with a spoken sentence of equal length, averaging roughly 1.09 seconds per item. The volume of all recordings was normalized to ensure consistency, though the infant cries had a higher average pitch of 430 hertz compared to 233 hertz for adult speech.

During the experiment, participants listened to twenty blocks of auditory stimuli, with ten blocks containing crying sounds and ten blocks containing spoken sentences. Each block lasted approximately twenty seconds and contained ten different audio samples presented in a randomized order. Silent rest periods lasting between twenty-five and thirty seconds were placed between the blocks to give the brain time to reset.

When comparing the neural activity triggered by both sound types, the authors observed that newborns showed greater activity in response to crying than to speech within the right temporal region of the brain. The temporal regions are primarily involved in processing sound and acoustic patterns. When listening to spoken language alone, the infants exhibited heightened activity in the left temporal and right temporo-parietal areas compared to silent baseline periods.

When listening to crying sounds, the newborns demonstrated increased activity in left fronto-temporo-parietal regions as well as right temporal regions. The activation in the frontal cortex is notable because this area contains the motor regions that control physical movement. Spoken language did not trigger this motor region activity in the newborns, suggesting that brain areas tied to movement respond specifically to sounds the infants can produce.

These results contradicted the research team’s initial expectations regarding early language processing. “Since language is so important and babies learn it so fast, in just a few years, we originally expected to see stronger brain responses to speech than to cries,” Gervain told PsyPost. “We were actually surprised to see that newborns respond to cries more strongly, suggesting that what they can produce is important for them.”

The adult participants exhibited a different pattern of neural responses compared to the infants. In adults, spoken language generated significantly greater brain activity than infant crying across the left temporo-parietal and right temporal regions. Because the adult participants spoke Italian and did not understand French, their temporal lobes processed the unfamiliar speech sounds based on their acoustic structures rather than their word meanings.

The adults showed activation within frontal motor regions when listening to both spoken sentences and newborn crying, reflecting their physical capability to produce both sound types. Gervain emphasized the primary takeaway from how newborn brains handle these signals. “Our findings show that the brains of newborn babies, just after a day or two after birth, respond more strongly to cries, so to the communicative sounds they themselves can produce, than to speech,” Gervain observed. “This suggests that producing sounds may play a stronger role in perception than we previously believed.”

She added that self-produced vocalizations serve a practical purpose in early human development. “The sounds babies themselves can produce are very important for them and can help them learn more about the sounds themselves and about communication more generally,” Gervain stated.

The emotional intensity of crying represents one potential factor that requires thoughtful consideration when interpreting these findings. Crying naturally conveys distress, which tends to heighten emotional arousal in listeners and could potentially increase brain activity independently of vocal production. Emotional arousal alone does not fully account for why motor regions of the brain were activated exclusively by crying in newborns and by both sounds in adults.

Future research could build upon these findings by evaluating how infants respond to cries produced by newborns from different language backgrounds or by testing whether babies display unique brain patterns when hearing recordings of their own cries. Gervain and her colleagues are currently extending this line of research to older infants to see how brain responses evolve alongside developing vocal abilities.

“Continuing this line, we are now looking at somewhat older infants, 6-to-10-month-olds, and seeing how they respond to babbling,” Gervain said. “Following the logic of the current study, 6-to-10-month-olds just begin to produce speech, and their production, that is babbling, is not yet like adult speech, but this is what they themselves can produce, so babbling may be particularly important for them.”

She noted that her team is currently recording brain activity to track these changes across development. “So we are now testing how babies’ brains react to babbling as compared to speech between 6 and 10 months, and whether this changes with their increasing ability to babble or speak,” Gervain explained.

The study, “Do babies perceive cries as speech?,” was authored by Gaia Lucarini, Irene de la Cruz-Pavía, Jessica Gemignani, Caroline Nallet, Alexandre Lapillonne, and Judit Gervain.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/newborn-brains-respond-more-strongly-to-crying-than-to-speech-study-finds/

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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #newborneysbrains #criesvsspeech #productionperceptionlink #earlylanguagedevelopment #infanthearing #cryofthebrain #fNIRS #neuroscienceofspeech #babiesbabble #languageacquisition

What a great few days at the International Society for Exercise Neuroscience #ISENS Conference & Workshop! A big thank you to all the bright-minded participants for the inspiring discussions and shared enthusiasm for advancing exercise neuroscience and wearable neuroimaging. And special kudos to Chiara Bulgarelli (@cbulgarelli01 ) for delivering an excellent presentation! We look forward to seeing you all again at future #fNIRS events🌟

#ExerciseNeuroscience #Neuroscience

The brain doesn't work in isolation, and neither should your imaging setup🧠⚡ At booth #39-40, Artinis & @NIRx Medical Technologies are showing #fNIRS + #EEG multimodality: hemodynamic & electrophysiological signals combined in a wearable, portable setup ready for lab and real-world use.

Visit booth #44 for:
🔹 APEX EEG + Brite fNIRS
🔹 SAGA EEG + NIRSport2 demos!

Come find us before the doors close! #OHBM2026 #MobileBrainImaging #Neuroscience
https://www.artinis-nirx.com/ohbm-2026-bordeaux

30 brains. One experiment. Meet Brite Ultra — the world's only mass #fNIRS #hyperscanning system by Artinis & @NIRx Medical Technologies — live at booth #39-40 today.
Lightweight, wireless, and built to synchronize up to 30 participants at once.

Visit booth #44 for:
🔹 APEX EEG + Brite fNIRS
🔹 SAGA EEG + NIRSport2 demos!

You have to see this for yourself! #🧠 #OHBM2026 #BriteUltra #Neuroscience
https://www.artinis-nirx.com/ohbm-2026-bordeaux

At booth #39-40 today, Artinis & @NIRx Medical Technologies are demoing #fNIRS + #TMS, a powerful combination for brain stimulation research that gives you both the trigger and the response. Come, join us at 1 PM!

Visit booth #44 for:
🔹 APEX EEG + Brite fNIRS
🔹 SAGA EEG + NIRSport2 demos!

https://www.artinis-nirx.com/ohbm-2026-bordeaux #🧠 #OHBM2026 #BrainStimulation #Neuroscience #Neuroimaging

In a recent proof-of-concept study, Haran Sened and colleagues explored inter-brain plasticity during #psychotherapy for test anxiety.
Using the Brite for #fNIRS hyperscanning, the researchers measured therapist and patient brain activity in participants undergoing a 6-session test anxiety treatment. Their results showed that inter-brain synchrony gradually increased over treatment and was associated with reduced symptoms and improved wellbeing.

🔗 https://zurl.co/capgc

Using #fNIRS #hyperscanning, Li et al. (2025) show that when individuals from different backgrounds engage in real-world problem solving, inter-brain synchronization (IBS) increases in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), a region linked to executive function.
Their findings offer a valuable lens on cross-functional teams, innovation processes, and how we design collaborative environments.

🔗 Read more: https://zurl.co/52Bex

#Neuroscience #CognitiveScience

Curious to learn how to study real interactions in large groups but missed our Hyperscanning Summer School? 

In this session, David Zijderveld walks us through:
🟡 What makes Brite Ultra the hyperscanning fNIRS device
🔵 How it enables seamless large-group measurements
🟡 What this means for the future of social neuroscience

🔗 Catch up anytime and see large-scale hyperscanning in action:

https://zurl.co/FGlKY

#Hyperscanning #fNIRS #BriteUltra #Artinis #Neuroscience #SocialInteraction

Ok. Now expert* on Spatially Resolved Spectroscopy....
(* for very limited and generous interpretations of 'expert')
#projects #fNIRS

In this recent article, St. Clair et al. (2025) use #fNIRS hyperscanning to examine neural coherence between children aged 4 to 6 and their mothers during joint tasks. One of the strengths of this paper is the care taken in handling the data. By refining the analysis approach for developmental hyperscanning, the observed synchrony reflects real interaction effects rather than noise.
🔗 https://zurl.co/TkoPK

#Hyperscanning #Neuroscience

Thank you for the incredible response to our recent #fNIRS Introduction Courses! Our next stop is #Sydney 🇦🇺

📅 Friday, April 24
⏰ 10 AM – 5 PM
📍 University of Sydney, Camperdown/Darlington Campus

Join us for a full day of hands-on learning and expert insights. Spots are limited 👉 https://zurl.co/HYf2l

#Neuroscience #Neuroimaging

A recent study by Zhao et al. used #fNIRS to measure prefrontal activation in pilots during a simulated flight. By comparing different flight scenarios, the researchers showed that the Brite system could successfully distinguish positive (eustress) from negative (distress) based on brain oxygenation patterns. This ability to monitor mental state in real time highlights the potential of fNIRS for applications in cognitive neuroscience research.

🔗 https://zurl.co/4S1YR
#Cognitive #NeuroScience

Age-related neural dynamics revealed by time-domain #fNIRS decoding of audiovisual dual-task processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432826000938 "Age-related neural dynamics are best captured under high cognitive load"; #multisensory #integration

🧠 From setup to real-time decoding: how fNIRS-BCIs actually work. In Part 1 of our #fNIRS #BCI: Methodology and (clinical) application possibilities" webinar series, Dr. Bettina Sorger from Maastricht University & Dr. Franziska Klein from OFFIS guide you through system setup, experimental design, and the fundamentals of online analysis.

They also discuss the strengths & limitations of fNIRS compared to other BCI modalities.
▶️ https://zurl.co/pemtc

#Neuroscience #Neuroimaging

Can we measure learning in real classrooms?
Feng et al. (2025) used the Brite to monitor brain activity during live teaching sessions inside the classroom. Their study shows how #fNIRS can capture authentic neural responses in everyday educational settings. By taking neuroimaging beyond the lab, this study highlights the growing potential of wearable fNIRS to reveal how students engage and learn in real time.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://publications.artinis.com/publication/feng-rapid-2025/

#Neuroscience #BrainResearch

In a unique naturalistic study, Dupuy et al. used our Brite device to explore how museum visits impact well-being. By measuring prefrontal brain activation in real-life settings, the researchers were able to assess emotional and cognitive benefits of cultural exposure beyond the lab walls.

🟡 Participants explored a museum while wearing the Brite
🔵 Enhanced prefrontal activation during emotionally engaging art pieces

🔗 Read the full study here: https://publications.artinis.com/publication/dupuy-prefrontal-2024/

#fNIRS #Neuroscience

As the year comes to a close, we want to take a moment to say thank you.
Thank you to everyone who shared their work with us throughout the year. It has been inspiring to see how (f)NIRS continues to support research across brain, muscle, and clinical science. We are grateful for the conversations, collaborations, and the trust you place in us. We wish you a great end of the year and a bright start to the next one! ✨

Warm wishes,
The Artinis team 🧠🟡

#Artinis #fNIRS #Neuroscience

Hemodynamic initial-dip reflects local spiking activity.
🧠 Initial-dip: transient HbR increase.
🔍 More spatially specific than hemodynamic response.
📉 HbT decrease leads to capping HbR.
🔄 Biphasic HbR with early decrease, late rebound.

#fNIRS #Neuroimaging #Hemodynamics #Neuroscience #Pub2Post https://tnyp.me/l3nndrWk/m

In this study, de Bracque et al. used our PortaLite device to measure cerebral oxygenation in baboons, showing how adaptable the technique is across species and environments.

🟡 A non-invasive approach that keeps animal welfare central
🔵 Reliable monitoring of cerebral activity during naturalistic behavior
🟡 New opportunities to understand primate cognition and comparative neuroscience

🔗   https://publications.artinis.com/publication/debracque-cerebral-2022/

#fNIRS #Neuroscience #AnimalResearch #Artinis

We will be part of the Social Dynamics Workshop 2025, taking place on November 20–21 at @Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands🇳🇱

Join us for a live demonstration of the Brite Ultra —the world’s only mass #fNIRS hyperscanning system— and discover how large-scale, real-time brain monitoring can advance research in social interaction & group dynamics.
www.artinis.com/events/social-dynamics-workshop-2025

#Hyperscanning #Neuroscience #SocialDynamics

Naik et al. combined fNIRS and EEG measurements with machine learning to classify cognitive workload levels in surgeons. Using the Brite, their multimodal setup captured both hemodynamic and electrical brain activity, revealing subtle neural patterns linked to task complexity and surgical expertise.
This study shows how integrating #fNIRS and #EEG provides a more comprehensive view of cognitive processes.

🔗 Read the full article here: https://publications.artinis.com/publication/naik-novel-2024/

#Neuroscience

⏰ Starting in 1 hour! Join Dr. Bettina Sorger (@Maastricht University ) & Dr. Franziska Klein (OFFIS Oldenburg) for the final session of our fNIRS-BCI webinar series —exploring #clinical applications of #fNIRS #BCI, from interaction BCIs for motor-impaired patients to neurofeedback training in neurological and psychiatric disorders.

🕞 Today, 3:30–5:00 PM CEST
👉 Join here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/87120d65-1e28-4b6a-b84a-fe02d3c08976@59671240-e400-45e0-802e-35aa686f7c52

For more information, visit: https://www.artinis.com/nirs-webinar

#Neuroscience #Neurotechnology

⏰ Starting in 1 hour! Join Dr. Bettina Sorger (Maastricht University) and Dr. Franziska Klein (OFFIS Oldenburg) for the first session of our fNIRS-BCI webinar series —discover the principles, setup, and clinical applications of #fNIRS #BCI.

🕞 Today, 3:30–5:00 PM CEST
👉 Join here: https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/be550b22-138d-40f0-a555-f40251eadc43@59671240-e400-45e0-802e-35aa686f7c52

More information: https://www.artinis.com/nirs-webinar

#Neuroscience #Neurotechnology

How does carrying heavy loads in low-oxygen environments affect both brain and muscle? In their recent study, Baur et al. simultaneously measured brain and muscle oxygenation with the OctaMon and PortaMon to investigate the physiological response to thoracic load carriage in hypoxia.

By combining cerebral and muscular #NIRS data, the authors revealed how oxygenation patterns adapt under these demanding conditions.

🔗 Read it here: https://publications.artinis.com/publication/baur-thoracic-2025/

#fNIRS #SportsScience #Neuroscience

"Neural-Driven Image Editing" now I am literally done. #EEG and #fNIRS based image #AI modification:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.05397
Remember to put code and data online so people can understand and protect themselves, not just big companies

🌟 Join us this month as we explore the full potential of (f)NIRS in revealing the complete picture of oxygenation across the body, deepening our understanding of brain-muscle connectivity🧠💪

Begin with our introductory blog, outlining the application areas where simultaneous brain #fNIRS & muscle #NIRS measurements are most frequently used. It highlights key studies across categories & shows our optimal setups for combined measurements.
🔗 https://www.artinis.com/blogpost-all/simultaneously-measuring-brain-and-muscle-oxygenation

#brainmuscle #neuroscience

When research needs long-term monitoring in real life, comfort is essential. Artinis devices were worn for hours when Klop et al. tracked orthostatic hypotension at home and Fagerland et al. studied orchestra musicians mid-performance.
https://zurl.co/Y8Pm1
https://zurl.co/a4xvO
#fNIRS #artinis #neuroscience

Neurophotonics supports #OpenScience, transparency, #Reproducibility, and trust in research. Data sharing enables others to reuse your data for new discoveries increasing your impact!

https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/neurophotonics/author-guidelines#navBarAnchor

#neuroscience #neurophotonics #microscopy #fNIRS #OpticalImaging