by Veronica Spettmann

Your baby nieces and nephews will likely mimic you, Auntie, but won’t for long if you trick them, a new Canadian study shows. Researchers at Concordia University in Montreal found that when adults trick babies, they will no longer mimic the sounds, facial expressions, or actions of that person.

Diane Poulin-Dubois of the psychology department at Concordia says, “Specifically, infants choose not to learn from someone who they perceive as unreliable.” The findings published in Infant Behavior and Development showed that babies can differentiate between credible and un-credible sources.

The experiment looked at infants between the ages of 13 to 16 months. The babies would be excitedly presented with a box and were left to discover if there was actually a toy inside or not. Only 34 percent of those babies paired with the unreliable adults actually followed suit when the adult used his or her forehead to turn on a push-on light, while 61 percent of the babies paired with a reliable adult mimicked the action of turning on the light with their foreheads.

After this study, Aunties may want to think twice before playing what is believed to be a harmless prank on their infant nieces and nephews!



Image Courtesy: Djuliet
Published: December 14, 2011