NIH Radio
Infants Capable of Learning While Asleep – 4
Narrator: This is NIH Health Matters. I’m Joe Balintfy. For a study, researchers played a tone, while a machine blew a faint puff of air at a sleeping infant’s eyelids. The infants’ reflex was to close its eyes tighter. Fairly quickly, most of the infants would react to the tone alone. Dr. William Fifer at Columbia University says the fact that babies learned how to associate a tone with a puff of air is nothing you would meet in the real world.
Fifer: But it demonstrates the fact that this kind of learning is done by babies and, in fact, is something that they might do frequently.
Narrator: In their sleep at that. For more on this study visit nichd.nih.gov. Health Matters is produced by the National Institutes of Health, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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