Babies Can Follow Complex Social Situations, Says Mizzou Study

A new study claims that babies are smarter than we think and can make sense of complex social situations around them. Findings of the study showed that 13-month-olds could make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' minds and social evaluation skills. Study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri said that, “the research is innovative in that we show that infants are able to construe social situations from different participants' perspectives.”

The researchers brought 48 infants into the lab for their experiment. The infant, who were around 1 year old, sat on his or her parent's lap, facing a little stage where hand puppets would appear.

Two puppets, A and B, appeared on the stage and clapped their hands or hopped around together, allowing the infants to familiarise themselves with the characters and learn that A and B were friendly with each other.

Then, the infants were presented with a particular social scenario. In one, the infants saw a third puppet, C, approach and get deliberately knocked down by B, as A looked on from the side. In another scenario, B knocked down C, but A wasn't present. And in a third scenario, C was accidentally knocked down as A looked on.

The researchers analysed that they found that the infants responded to outcomes in the three scenarios differently, in accordance with the social implications of each scenario.  The research was published in Psychological Science.

Source-Medindia