Are you smarter than a baby?
A new University of Chicago study that examined the intelligence of infants shows that infants can tell if the people they are looking at are friends or enemies.
Babies as young as 9-months-old can determine if adults are friends by observing their facial expressions and reactions as they interact in social environments, Science Daily reported.
The study, "Friends or Foes: Infants Use Shared Evaluations to Infer Others' Social Relationships," was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The results bring new insight into the way humans develop reasoning skills and knowledge of their surroundings. The infants were able to understand the adult relationships they saw, even before they learn how to talk.
"This is some of the first evidence that young infants are tracking other people's social relationships," University of Chicago psychology professor Amanda L. Woodward, who co-authored the study, told Science Daily.
Sixty-four infants were divided into groups and showed different videos involving two adults. In one of the videos the adults each ate two foods, then acted like the food tasted either good or bad.
"Eating with family or friends is inherently social, and so infants might be particularly inclined to use eating behaviors to make inferences about social relationships.
The 9-month-olds were also shown a video of the same adults acting like they were friends, saying "Hi" in friendly voices, and another video with the adults acting hostile towards each other.
When the videos were finished, the babies stared at the screen longer when they saw the adults who acted like they enjoyed the same foods also acted like they were enemies. The babies gave the same confused reaction when they saw the adults who did not like the same foods act friendly.
"When babies see something unexpected, they look longer," Woodward told Science Daily. "It's out of place for them and they have to make sense of it."
The babies in the study anticipated that adults who like the same things were going to be friends, Science Daily reported.
"Parents will be interested to know that babies are keeping track of what's going on in the work around them and are making inferences about social interactions that we previously were not aware of," Zoe Liberman, a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, told Science Daily.
