Babies Bawl

The new study is just one in a series of recent reports that reveal the centrality of crying to infant survival, and how a baby’s bawl punches through a cluttered acoustic landscape to demand immediate adult attention.

The sound of an infant’s cry arouses a far quicker and stronger response in action-oriented parts of the adult brain than do similarly loud or emotionally laden noises, like a dog barking or a neighbor weeping.

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“If a stimulus stays the same, it’s easy to tune out,” said Katherine S. Young, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But something that changes over time is very difficult to ignore.”

Police sirens and other alert sounds mimic this pattern of a slow increase and decrease in pitch, said Dr. Young, “because it grabs and holds your attention.”



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/04/science/crying-babies-animals.html