Baby Looks

It’s always interesting to study the behavior of babies, well, for me, at least.:p

Yoon and Johnson did a study on 12-month-olds to test their perception of biological motion. Biological motion is the “motion of a person or other living organism” (Goldstein, 2010). Studies that test the perception of this type of motion use point-light displays in which small lights are attached to a person’s joints and he or she is filmed performing actions in the dark (Goldstein, 2010).

Yoon and Johnson’s wanted to test whether “biological motion perception is developmentally integrated with important social cognitive abilities” (Yoon & Johnson, 2009). In their study, 12-month-olds viewed a video in which the point-light figure paced back and forth three times, then stopped in the middle and faced the viewer. Then, there were four test trials in which the figure turned to look at one of the two point-light targets on the ground (on the bottom-left and bottom-right sides of the screen), twice for each side. To control for low-level directional information, half of the infants were placed in the upright condition and the other half were placed in the inverted condition in which the video was shown upside down. (You can view the video they used here: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~jyoon/Videos.html). The infant’s eye movements were recorded by a camera placed directly in front of the screen. Two blind coders coded the infants’ first looks away from the midline for each test trial and categorized them as either to the right, to the left, directed at the caretaker, or directed at the self. Results of this experiment showed that infants did not recognize the figure in the inverted displays. However, in the upright condition, there was significant evidence that infants were able to systematically follow the gaze of the figure. These findings tell us that “the ability to analyze perceptually biological motion contained in a point-light display is developmentally integrated with other sociocognitive behaviors, specifically, the fundamental social ability to follow the attentional orientation of another human” (Yoon & Johnson, 2009).

I find it interesting that babies as young 12 months old can follow other people’s gazes. I think this sociocognitive ability would have implications on the ways infants learn about the world around them. The interactions they have with other people and the movies or TV show they watch would help their learning in this area. The findings of this study also remind me of how important it is to model good behavior for children, no matter how young they are, because they are influenced by our behaviors. In addition, this study makes wonder if babies can also understand other biological motions and interpret their social meanings. I’m not sure if that is testable but I hope future studies could answer questions related to that.

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