Every time I babysit I wonder what the baby is thinking.
And when it cries, I’m like what what small human?
What are you trying to tell me?
The meaning of life?
And stop calling me peasant.
Hey guys Julia here for DNews
Babies.
Man, babies.
Cute.
Cooing.
Pooping little humans.
While adorable, they aren’t the smartest in the bunch.
I mean, I hide behind my hands and they think I’m gone forever.
And peek a boo!
My face just pops out of nowhere.
But lately researchers are finding out babies are smarter than we think.
A recent study published in the journal Developmental Science found that babies can reason logically,
even before the age of one.
Which apparently researchers thought people couldn’t do until the age of 5 or 6.
How did researchers figure this out you ask?
Well it’s not like they could just give babies a logic problem to solve.
Instead they had them watch puppets.
In this study the puppets acted out a little scene of social hierarchy.
Basically puppet one is more dominant than puppet two, then in another scene puppet two
is more dominant that puppet 3.
So who would be more dominant?
Puppet one or puppet three?
If you said puppet 1, congratulations!
you’re just as smart as a ten month old baby.
You can understand transitive inference, which is a type of deductive reasoning which allows
someone to make inferences about things that weren’t explicitly compared before.
Basically the researchers could tell what a baby understood based on how long they stared
at the puppet show.
If the show went against the transitive inference and puppet 3 was more dominant, then the babies
were confused and stared longer.
That’s based on earlier research that shows that when something is unfamiliar or unexpected,
babies will look at it longer.
And it seems it’s not the only thing young infants can grasp.
Knowledge of social situations seems to get wired in pretty early on in brain development.
In a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General researchers found that
infants as young as 9 months could understand that people were likely to be friends based
on their shared interests; for example, if they have the same reactions to food.
In this study researchers show babies videos where people ate food.
They either really liked it or made a "hmph" kind of gesture about it.
The babies expected those who liked the same food to be friends and were confused when
they weren’t.
The researchers take this to mean that babies are very aware of what’s going on around
them and keep track of people’s interactions.
Babies even have a kind of theory of mind around 18 months according to a study published
in Developmental Psychology.
Which researchers thought kids couldn’t do until age 8 or so.
Theory of Mind is trying to imagine what’s going on in someone else’s head.
That someone else may want things different from what you want.
In one clever experiment a researcher gave babies two bowls.
One filled with broccoli and the other with tasty crackers.
The babies prefered the crackers.
Then the researcher would eat from one of the bowls and either make a happy or disgusted
reaction.
They gave the bowls back to the baby and asked “can I have some”, if the researcher acted
happy about the broccoli, the baby gave them broccoli, even though that’s not what the
babies prefered.
This showed that these young children could understand someone else’s desires and use
that information in how they responded to them.
Heck even adults struggle with this sometimes.
So babies are capable of logical reasoning and empathy, something researchers thought
wasn’t possible.
So one of the lead researchers of the broccoli-goldfish study Dr. Alison Gopnick believes adults could
learn a thing or two from babies.
You know how I said babies stare at things that are new or confusing?
Well babies are really good at paying attention to lots of new and novel things, they just
kind of soak in everything.
While as we grow up we learn to focus on just one thing.
And sometimes that can blind us to other possibilities.
She said in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that “Babies, on the other hand, seem to
have a positive hunger for the unexpected.”
And that means they’re like little ideal scientists.
Yeah now I’m kind of terrified to baby sit again.
I might not be so terrified of babies if I knew exactly what I was getting into.
I mean what if you could control every detail about your baby will turn out?
Sounds like science fiction?
Well designer babies might not be too far off.
To learn more check out this video where julian and i debate the pros and cons of designing
your baby.