Babies Know What’s Up
New York Magazine:
Babies as young as 13 months seem to be able to follow the complexities of a tense social situation, even showing surprise when those involved don’t behave as expected, suggests a new paper in Psychological Science. You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri did their research by putting on a simple puppet show for 48 infants and their parents.
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Choi and Luo were curious: How would the babies react to subsequent interactions between puppets A and B, and how would those reactions differ according to which version of the show the babies had seen? Obviously, the 13-month-olds couldn’t tell the researchers what they were thinking. But babies (and grown-ups, for that matter) tend to pay more attention to unexpected or surprising actions; accordingly, their gaze doesn’t linger as long on the comparatively boring, expected stuff.
Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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