Here's Why Your Baby Is So Smart: Infants Can Identify Complex Social Situations

Chances are, your 2-year-old is a bit more intelligent than you thought. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have found that the babies of the world are actually quite brilliant, in fact. They can easily grasp complex social situations and act accordingly in relation to what they've just experienced.

Researcher You-jung Choi, a doctoral candidate at MU and Yuyan Luo, associate professor of psychological sciences in the College of Arts and Science, discovered that when using puppets and studying the reactions of 13-month-old infants, many were able to comprehend just what was happening.

Certain scenarios used in the study included characters being friendly and hitting each other with and without witnesses. Researchers timed each baby's gaze time, which worked as an indication of infant knowledge and understanding.

"Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' perspectives and by using social evaluation skills," said Choi, in a news release. "Infants can't tell us what they expect to happen, so we observe their looking time as a way of determining infant expectations. Things that are normal or expected are relatively boring and infants quickly look away; things that are unusual or unexpected, however, are interesting and cause infants to spend more time looking at them."

The babies were exposed to a series of positive and negative scenarios during the study. The first scenario involved two puppets clapping their hands, hopping together or looking at each other for the first time. In another scene, a third puppet was introduced that intentionally hit or caused problems with the other puppets.

"These scenarios are a bit like adults witnessing their friends behaving badly," added Luo. "If you were to witness your friend hitting another person, you'd tend to avoid him or her. If you had not witnessed the hit, you still would hang out with the friend. If the hit were an accident, then you may or may not spend time with them. Our results showed that babies reacted to these scenarios in similar ways. "

More information regarding the findings can be seen via the journal Psychological Science.

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