ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Evidence for temporal-coherence-based segregation of complex auditory scenes in the newborn human brain
Silvia Polver 1,2,3
Petra Kovács 1,4,5,6
Gábor Péter Háden 1,7
Istvan Sziller 8
István Winkler 1
Brigitta Tóth 1
1. HUN-REN Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
2. Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France
3. Universita degli Studi di Padova Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Padua, Italy
4. Department of Cognitive Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
5. Acoustics Research Institute, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
6. Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
7. Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary
8. Division of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, DBC, Szent Imre University Teaching Hospital, Budapest, Hungary
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Abstract
Detecting a target sound within a mixture of sounds (referred to as auditory stream segregation) is crucial for perception in natural environments, a skill humans and animals excel at. This study investigates the role of temporal coherence in auditory stream segregation in human newborns using high-density EEG recordings. Sleeping newborns were exposed to temporally coherent auditory tone sequences embedded in random background tones, and their event-related responses were analyzed. The results indicate that newborns can segregate auditory streams based on temporal coherence, suggesting that this stream segregation is driven by automatic mechanisms from birth, as evidenced by brain responses resembling the object-related negativity (ORN) event-related potential (ERP) component. However, discriminating among different signal-to-noise ratios requires further fine-tuning, as evidenced by delayed latencies in neonates compared to adults. These findings indicate that temporal coherence aids in detecting and orienting toward salient stimuli, thereby laying the foundation for the development of abilities such as selective attention and speech perception.
Summary
Keywords
auditory stream segregation, event-related potentials (ERP), Newborn infants, Object-related negativity (ORN), temporal coherence
Received
06 October 2025
Accepted
28 January 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Polver, Kovács, Háden, Sziller, Winkler and Tóth. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Silvia Polver
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