Netflix series Babies
A groundbreaking series returns to reveal infants’ advanced survival skills
Every parent knows that sometimes babies can appear a little helpless. They can’t talk, walk or even eat by themselves. But, as the second run of Netflix’s acclaimed documentary series Babies reveals, infants are actually pretty clever…
The six-parter follows 15 families from all over the globe during the first year of their babies’ lives, as they make sense of the world, use humour to form a bond and even develop their moral code.
‘There used to be this idea that babies were hapless blobs allowing the world to go by, or that they were a blank slate,’ says Susan Hespos, professor of cognitive psychology at America’s Northwestern University, who features in the first episode, What Babies Know. ‘But, actually, they’re actively working on the environment around them and thinking all the time. A baby is smarter than we think!’
Susan has developed a series of experiments that show how clever babies really are. By tracking their reaction to a specially-designed puppet show, she’s managed to prove that babies are born with a basic understanding of how the world works, including a knowledge of gravity!
Meanwhile, Kang Lee from the University of Toronto, Canada, has studied how babies process faces and has found that they’re likely to prefer ones that look familiar.
‘Imagine a father has a beard – that’s then something the baby is very used to,’ explains Kang. ‘A male face without a beard will then be very alarming to the child.
‘It turns out that babies naturally associate different emotional tones to familiar faces versus unfamiliar faces. It helps them develop an ability to know who they can trust.’