EEG Study Finds Newborns Show Brain-Activity Changes When Numbers of Sounds and Dots Match

Newborns aged between a few hours and three days displayed distinct patterns of brain activity when presented with matching quantities of sounds and images, indicating an innate sense of number. Researchers at the University of Trento fitted 21 newborns with EEG caps and monitored electrical activity while the infants heard a 90-second recording of syllables repeated in groups of either four or 12.

At the same time the babies viewed a visual display of either four or 12 dots for up to 50 seconds.

Electrical activity in the parietotemporal area decreased when the number of dots matched the number of syllables, consistent with repetition suppression, an adaptive process in which the brain reduces its response to a repeated stimulus. Activity rose when the quantities did not match. ” The parietotemporal area perceives and organises sensory information.

Buiatti stated the study is the first to report a neural response consistent with number processing in newborns. Brian Butterworth of University College London, who was not involved, noted that extracting numerical information is part of the brain’s essential “start-up” toolkit, comparable to perceiving colour. A child’s number sense at one year of age predicts later mathematics skills.

Buiatti said further research could help design an early neural biomarker for the risk of developing dyscalculia, a learning difficulty that affects understanding, recall or use of numerical information. The findings appear in a preprint posted on bioRxiv with the identifier 10.64898/2026.05.08.723896.