Infants can judge people’s PREFERENCES

‘Even before they can talk, babies are keeping close track of what’s going on in front of them and looking for patterns of activity that may suggest preferences’

Babies as young as 8 months can log our every move and make odds on what a person is most likely to do next, a study suggests. “Even before they can talk, babies are keeping close track of what’s going on in front of them and looking for patterns of activity that may suggest preferences,” said Lori Markson, associate professor at Washington University in the US.

“Make the same choice three or four times in a row, and babies as young as 8 months come to view that consistent behaviour as a preference,” said Markson

The findings demonstrated that infants look for consistent patterns of behaviour and make judgements about people’s preferences based on simple probabilities calculated from observed events and actions.

The study may shed light on how infants and young children learn about people’s preferences for a certain kind of food, toy or activity. It might also explain why kids always seem to want the toy that someone else is playing with.

“Consistency seems to be an important factor for infants in helping them sort out what is happening in the world around them,” Markson said.

“Our findings suggest that, if a person does something different even a single time, it undoes the notion of someone having a clear preference and changes an infant’s expectations for that individual’s behaviour.

“In other words, if you break the routine, all bets are off in terms of what they expect from you,” said Markson.

The findings confirmed that infants as young as 8 months are already developing the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to sense what another person may or may not know, think or believe about a situation.

In the study, Markson and Yuyan Luo, an associate professor at University of Missouricolumbia, conducted a series of experiments to track how infant “looking times” changed when an actor made an unexpected choice between one of two stuffed-animal toys displayed before the infant on a small puppet stage. The experiments were conducted on a sample of 60 healthy, full-term infants with an even split of males and females ranging in age from 7 to 9 months and an average age of 8 and a half months. Seated on a parent’s lap, the infants watched as a young woman reached out and grabbed one of two stuffed animals on the stage, either a white-and-brown dog or a yellow duck with orange beak and a purple bonnet. After each four-trial familiarisation phase, the researcher observed the babies’ reactions as the women reappeared on the stage and made a fifth selection, either going back to the previously targeted duck or making a new selection of the dog. Findings confirmed that the babies spent about 50 per cent more time looking at selections that represented a break from consistent patterns made in the familiarisation trials. The study was published in the journal Infancy.