Infant-directed songs may credibly signal parental attention to infants, conveying information to infants that an adult is nearby, attending to them, and keeping them safe 22, 23. Human parental investment is routinely provided to infants in response to their elicitations, which often take the form of fussiness and crying 21. Such resources, whether material (like food) or not (like attention) constitute parental investment 20. Relative to other animals, human infants are helpless to survive, they rely on resources provided by parents and alloparents 19. Why are infants so interested in music? One possibility centers on the dynamics of parent-offspring interactions. Older infants differentiate synchronous movement from asynchronous movement in response to music 13 become attuned to the rhythms of their native culture’s music by their first birthday 14 garner social information from the songs they hear 15, 16 and recall music in impressive detail 17, 18 after long delays 15. Infants demonstrate a remarkable variety of responses to music as they develop: in the first few days of life, newborns remember melodies heard in the womb 10 distinguish consonant from dissonant intervals 11 and detect musical beats 12. Music is a human universal 1– 4 that appears often in the lives of infants and their families 5– 9. Together, these findings suggest that infants may be predisposed to respond to common features of lullabies found in different cultures. The infants’ parents overwhelmingly chose lullabies as the songs that they would use to calm their fussy infant, despite their unfamiliarity. They do so consistently throughout the first year of life, suggesting the response is not a function of their musical experiences, which are limited relative to those of adults. Here, we show that American infants ( N = 144) relax in response to 8 unfamiliar foreign lullabies, relative to matched non-lullaby songs from other foreign societies, as indexed by heart rate, pupillometry, and electrodermal activity. This property could reflect a function of listeners’ experiences, the basic design of the human mind, or both. For example, adult listeners accurately identify unfamiliar lullabies as infant-directed on the basis of their musical features alone. Music is characterized by acoustical forms that are predictive of its behavioral functions.
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