Neural encoding of auditory rhythm beyond cortical auditory areas before the age of term
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rhythm experience begins in fetal life, shaping neural capacities critical for language, communication, and motor skills. While rhythm processing in adults involves distributed cortical networks, including premotor and supplementary motor regions, the mechanisms in the fetal brain remain unclear. We provide evidence that premature newborns encode rhythmic beats through cortical networks extending beyond the auditory cortex into premotor and sensorimotor regions. Using high-density functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we show that auditory beats trigger distinct cortical activation patterns, indicating early involvement of an auditory-motor network, despite the absence of coordinated motor activity. Our results highlight a fundamental role for these regions in rhythm perception, forming the basis for predictive timing mechanisms. This early engagement of sensorimotor regions reveals a neural framework supporting beat perception from the fetal stage onward. These findings advance understanding of the neural architecture for rhythm processing, showing that the premature brain is already wired for complex auditory-motor interactions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".