Enrichment of In Utero Rhythmic Experience Promotes Postnatal Visuospatial Attention

By 2 months of age, infants leverage predictable temporal structures to optimize attention allocation, disengaging faster from rhythmic than nonrhythmic stimuli-a pattern absent in newborns and attributed to postnatal experience. Here, we investigated whether prenatal rhythmic enrichment provides an earlier foundation for this competence. From week 29 until delivery, pregnant women (N = 101) provided fetuses either multisensory rhythmic stimulation (experimental, N = 49) or nonrhythmic relaxation (control, N = 52). Visual attention disengagement was assessed using an overlap task with rhythmic, nonrhythmic, and static stimuli, at birth (N = 30 per group) and 2 months (N = 30 per group). At 2 months, both groups showed the expected attentional cost for nonrhythmic stimuli. At birth, this pattern appeared only in the experimental group, indicating that prenatal rhythmic enrichment accelerates the typical developmental timeline for temporal attention tuning. Individual differences further showed that greater amounts of prenatal rhythmic stimulation predicted faster overall disengagement at birth, and a stronger cost for nonrhythmic stimuli at 2 months. While acknowledging methodological constraints inherent to the population under study, these findings suggest that the developing brain begins to tune to environmental temporal structure prenatally, and that this process is promoted by in utero rhythmic experience.