Noticing what your baby is listening to – what is auditory attention?

You may have memories from childhood of someone telling you to ‘pay attention,’ but might have never really thought about all the skills needed to do this. Being able to focus attention on a sound, sight, smell or other sensation is an important skill that helps us to learn. As your baby is beginning to show what sounds they are listening to, by turning or looking, it’s useful to know more about auditory attention. 

Auditory attention – choosing which sound to focus on 

The sounds they hear help your baby learn about the world around them. They’ve made the connection between some sounds and what will happen next – so might recognise the sound of a video call or a knock at the door.  

And your baby has listened to you and others talking and singing and begun to understand words and variations in the tone of voice people use and how this communicates meaning.  

Our brain enables selective hearing 

This is all amazing, but listening isn’t just what happens with our ears, but also with our brains. Humans don’t have unlimited capacity to process sounds, so your baby needs to learn how to select what they listen to and filter out the rest of the noise.  

And this is where auditory attention comes in – we must find a way to use our attention efficiently, so we listen to the most useful sound for us at that moment.  

For your baby, this might be focusing on a new sound – that could signal something interesting they learn about or listening to a sound that they know is linked to a particular event or activity.  

The Goldilocks effect and auditory attention 

Researchers looked at the types of sounds babies would listen to for longer and found that they tended to listen to sounds that were neither too simple nor too complex – but were just right.  

This could be because they don’t have the cognitive skills to listen to complex sounds, or that they select the sounds that might be most useful for learning – so not too simple and predictable and not too complicated and difficult to learn from.  

Watch and see what sounds interest your baby

Now, when you notice your baby seems interested in a sound, you could think about why this might be. Is it a new sound they think they can learn from, or perhaps a familiar sound that they link with part of their day? 

And it can help if sometimes your baby seems not to notice a sound to think about their limited attention – they’re still developing these skills and can’t focus their attention on everything they hear.  

You know your baby best and if you’re concerned about your baby’s hearing talk to a health professional who works with your family. 

Reference: 

Kidd C, Piantadosi ST, Aslin RN. (2014). The Goldilocks effect in infant auditory attention. Child Development, 85(5):1795-804.