Friday, June 19, 2020

Fun Freetime: Babies on Netflix

Filmed over the course of three years, Babies is a landmark series that explores the miracle of the first full year of life through the pioneering work of leading scientists from across the globe. It's an in depth look at the first year of life -- the science behind babies' developments, from sleeping, to eating, crawling to walking and everything in between! The series follows several new parents as they go on this new journey as well as 30+ of the top scientists from around the globe.

Amongst the world class scientists featured are Rebecca Saxe (MIT) and her ground breaking study showing babies are already fine-tuned for seeing and understanding people from an early age; Vasu Reddy’s (University of Portsmouth) work around how even very young babies use humour to form a bond; Malinda Carpenter (University of St. Andrews, Scotland) who studies the gestures babies make to share their experience of the world, she believes pointing gestures form the foundation of human culture and communication; Kiley Hamlin (University of British Columbia), whose work reveals that morality may be innate rather than learnt and Julie Mennella’s (Monell Institute) hugely influential study that found a direct link between what mothers eat during pregnancy and breastfeeding and your baby’s tastes.

I had a chance to interview two of the scientists to learn more about their work.

Vasu Reddy, University of Portsmouth
Why did you start researching laughter in babies?
I became interested in baby laughter because it revealed more than just amusement: it seemed to hold the answer to a lot of puzzles in early social awareness.
It is a strong emotional reaction and what infants laugh at tells us about what infants perceive and pick up as significant and as attractive.
It tells us more importantly, about how their laughter relates to what other people in their world are doing - for instance whether their laughter is shared with others in the context of joint activities, or somehow separate and unshared.
It tells us about infant interest in other people's emotional reactions generally, and other people's laughter in particular. Infant clowning is an attempt to re-elicit others' laughter by repeating whatever led them to laugh before (like making funny faces, or silly actions, fake coughs etc)

How early can babies laugh?
Babies typically start laughing around 3 and a half to 4 months, although as with all things developmental, this varies between individual infants. But even before you can identify a sound as a clear laugh - for weeks before - you get babies making almost-laughs - like little hiccupy sounds while smiling broadly while you are busy trying to smile and chat with them, or even actually trying to make them. You may not be sure whether this is actually a laugh or you are just imagining it. Call them almost laughs and you can see these little hiccuppy reactions developing into clearer and clearer laughs and often in the same contexts of face to face interaction.

Why is laughter such an important way to bond and how can parents encourage it?
Laughter is fun. The whole body relaxes, it occupies your mind even if only for an instant, though often for longer. it de-stresses you. Physiologically too, it is good cardio-vascular exercise (there are things called laughing clubs, for instance, where you fake laughter until you really laugh, and the actual physical process of laughing is believed to help). But most importantly I guess, it creates a shared connection with whoever you are laughing with. Shared laughter is something that can be seen in everyday life. Do infants look up at you and maybe smile or even laugh, when you laugh? Do they laugh at the same thing as you - for instance slapstick? You will know from your own lives, that sharing a laugh even with a stranger on a train for instance, can create for a brief while a stronger connection than any amount of talking. The combination of unstressed positive emotion and sharing makes for very strong connections with other people.

My only advice to parents is to get involved with their babies' laughter and interests. If they find something funny, explore it. If they are trying to be funny (clowning), be sensitive to it and respond - it is their way of developing connections with your world. If they are trying to trick you into doing something or teasing you by - eg., repeatedly dropping something or trying to touch something they know they shouldn't - well you have to work what is dangerous and what is not, but recognise that their attempts are a developmental advance in terms of them knowing what you want and don't want, and they are playfully exploring (and challenging) boundaries. They are taking your relationship with them to a new level. So, basically, enjoy it and recognise their attempts to connect - it won't last forever - and there couldn't be a more pleasant way to build strong relationships.

Felix Warneken, University of Michigan

How did you get involved in this area of research?
As a PhD student, I was interested in broader questions about cooperation as a critical aspect of human social life. Without our ability to cooperate with each other social life as we know it would not exist. So I became fascinated by the question what the building blocks of cooperation are like: How do you children learn to cooperate? This question together with a moment of serendipity resulted in my first study on helping in young children: I was sitting on the floor of our study room, playing with a toddler to try out a few games for a study I was working on at that time, when suddenly a ping-pong ball rolled into the corner of the room. With this idea of helping behaviors in the back of my head, I then pretended that I could not reach it and stretched my body across the room. The toddler looked at my attempts to reach the ball, got up, and happily put in my hand. This observation went against what was thought about toddlers at that time, a widely held belief that toddlers are all about “me - me - me!” and you have to train them to be helpful. We then designed a series of systematic experimental studies to get to the bottom of this behavior. We found that infants as young as 14-18 months are willing and able to help others in many different contexts. They often do so spontaneously, without prompting, praise, or rewards.

Why is helpfulness part of a baby's development?
We then went on to study helping behaviors in chimpanzees to look at whether this capacity is something that is human-unique or shared with our evolutionary cousins. To our surprise, chimpanzees also show basic helping behaviors, suggesting that altruistic helping has deep roots in human evolution. Our findings suggest that children are jump-started into caring not just about themselves, but also about others, a biological predisposition that can be refined by personal experience and socialization practices. While humans become more sophisticated in helping over time, you can find the basic capacities for helping already in infancy.

How can parents encourage helpfulness, even before their little ones are old enough to be very helpful?
One implication is that children do not have to be reprogrammed from an initially purely selfish being into a cooperator. Altruistic and selfish tendencies co-exist from early in life and we can elicit these responses by creating the right opportunities. The assumption that children are only after their own benefit can even have ironic effects: When you reward children who like helping others, they tend to become less likely to help in the future. Their initial motivation to help others altruistically is transformed into a motivation to help others just to receive a reward.

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