As we saw in 'Life before birth' (Nursery World, 20 May), during the final three months of intra-uterine life, babies are learning about their mother's voice, her language and some of the other sounds from the social world outside the womb. But the moment an infant is born, he is surrounded by two contrasting worlds: the animate, social world of people and other creatures, and the inanimate, physical world of objects and space.
People have faces, voices and a special gait, as well as thinking minds and intentions. By contrast, objects have features that obey physical laws but have no minds of their own.
This article will focus on how babies gradually come to learn about the social world, about how people base their actions on how they think the world is (and not necessarily how it really is), and how babies come to realise that they themselves are independent, thinking beings who are just like other people in the social world.
THE IMPORTANCE OF FACES
One of the most salient stimuli to confront the newborn is his mother's smiling face. The newborn will orient to her face immediately, particularly as he recognises the timbre of her voice from his life in the womb.
Experiments have shown that when, just a couple of hours after birth, babies are given a choice between two images on a screen - one with three blobs in the place of eyes and mouth, and the other with three blobs in another arrangement - they will look longer at the face-like pattern than at the other patterns.
And within the first weeks, they will prefer a photo of their mother's face to any of other female faces. Initially, they are not analysing her individual features, but focusing on her overall face, particularly her hairline. So, it's wise for mothers not to change their hairstyle in the early months of their baby's life!
Babies also go on to recognise other faces in their environment - father, grandparents, regular visitors, constantly expanding their social world.
Babies also pay attention to the expression on faces: happy, sad, angry, and fearful. They will often use their mother's expression to judge how they themselves should react to a situation. Thus, if a mother looks relaxed, or fearful, at an event, her baby will react in a similar way. Psychologists call this 'social referencing', and we will often observe a baby checking their parent's face before deciding how to react themselves.
Babies may also display their burgeoning memory development by using facial expressions. Again, careful examination of infant behaviours provides clues.
One example is that of a baby in his pushchair who smiles at a passerby. The latter responds by grinning and pulling out his tongue. A week later, the baby notices the same passerby in a shop, so looks between mother and passerby, then pulls out his own tongue to indicate something like: that's the man we saw the other day who pulled out his tongue.
Clearly, the infant had stored a memory of both the person's face and the details of the initial meeting, and found a way to express that memory prior to his ability to tell his mother in words.
Newborns will also copy behaviours on their parent's face. Thus, if a parent pulls out their tongue repeatedly while holding their newborn, the baby will start to pull out his tongue in response.
This is an amazing ability, because as yet the baby has not seen himself in a mirror and so does not know where his mouth and tongue are. Psychologists disagree on the interpretation of this behaviour, but most agree that it is an established fact.
When toddlers finally see themselves in the mirror, they initially fail to realise that it is themselves and will often go to look behind the mirror or stretch out to touch the 'other' baby. Learning about self and others is a long, protracted achievement that continues well beyond the pre-school years.
EYE GAZE
Recognising others and their facial emotions aren't the only reasons why babies pay particular attention to faces. Eye gaze direction is crucial in helping the infant discover what others are attending to and in showing others what they themselves are attending to. So, in the early months, babies will learn to follow others' gaze, to predict that something interesting must be in the other's focus of attention and look in the same direction. But this is no easy task.
Research has shown that it is crucial first to establish mutual gaze. If the adult's face is already averted towards another location, the baby will not follow the direction of gaze. The baby must first see the face looking directly at him (what psychologists call 'dyadic attention') before he will follow the averted eye gaze.
This clearly has important implications for shared attention and for object naming. So, if a mother establishes mutual gaze with her baby, then moves her eyes to an object and checks that her baby is looking in the same direction (what psychologists call 'triadic attention'), she will then name the object: 'Look, yes, that's a dog!'
Young children at risk of autism, for instance, dislike mutual gaze, and they tend to fail to develop normal triadic attention. This helps to explain why their vocabulary is poorer than that of their typically developing peers.
LEARNING THAT OTHERS HAVE THOUGHTS AND INTENTIONS
Imagine the following scenario. Your partner, without your knowing, moves your favourite chocolate from its special box in the kitchen to a drawer next to the sink. Where will you look for your chocolate? Obviously, where you think it is and not where it really is.
Understanding that other humans behave according to the beliefs and intentions they hold is called having 'a theory of mind'. It is an essential part of becoming a social being. We automatically attribute thoughts and intentions to others and expect them to behave accordingly. So, how do babies develop this essential capacity for understanding their social world, and how do psychologists test the pre-linguistic baby?
Ingenious experiments have been devised to test such knowledge in children before they can speak. In one, participants as young as 15 months are seated in front of a video screen and shown a scenario similar to the one involving the chocolate. For instance, first, a person on screen sees a bear hiding a ball in box. Then when her back is turned, the bear moves the ball from box A to box B. The person, of course, then looks for the ball in Box A.
By measuring the infants' anticipatory looks, psychologists have demonstrated that these toddlers already show a spontaneous understanding that the onscreen person will look in box A by moving their eyes in anticipation to box A, even though they themselves know that it has been moved to box B. In other words, they know that she holds a false belief about the location of the ball and that she will act in accordance with her false belief.
Interestingly, even high-functioning adults with autism (Asperger syndrome), while being able to solve these scenarios verbally if questioned, will not spontaneously anticipate with their eye movements where the person will look. Despite their high intelligence, they don't have a natural theory of mind, but have learned to work out logically how people behave.
In the complexities of our daily lives, it is crucial to pay spontaneous attention to what people are thinking and anticipate how they will behave. Imagine a game of chess or a tennis match, if we didn't have a theory of mind working out what we think our opponent will do next! We are always unconsciously or consciously working out what people's actions will be. Babies quickly learn to do this as they immerse themselves in the social world.
THE SOCIAL BRAIN
While the newborn's initial orienting to faces seems to immediately elicit bonding from adult caregivers, an equally important purpose of the newborn's attention to faces is to bias their visual system to process important aspects of their social world. This special attention to faces over the first months of life is likely to contribute to the tuning up of particular brain regions, known as the gradual development of the 'social brain'.
Interestingly, although networks in the temporal lobes already show activation, ie, increased blood flow, in response to faces in the very early months of life, research on the adolescent brain demonstrates that these brain networks actually continue to specialise well into the teenage years. In other words, becoming a fully-fledged social being takes many years, and even in adulthood we are still likely to find ourselves fine-tuning our skills as we encounter new social situations.
FURTHER READING
- Baron-Cohen, S, Ring, H, Moriarty, J, Schmitz, B Costa, D & Ell P (1994), 'Recognition of mental state terms: Clinical findings in children with autism and a functional neuroimaging study of normal adults', British Journal of Psychiatry, 165, 640-649
- Blakemore, SJ (2008), 'Development of the social brain during adolescence', Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 40-49
- Frith, U (1989), Autism: Explaining the enigma. Oxford: Blackwell
- Johnson, MH (2001), 'Functional brain development in humans', Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2, 475-483
- Onishi, K & Baillargeon, R (2005), 'Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs?', Science, 308, 255-258
- Senju, A & Csibra, G (2008), 'Gaze following in human infants depends on communicative signals', Current Biology, 18, 668-671
- Senju, A, Southgate V, White, S & Frith, U, 'Mindblind Eyes: An Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome', Science, July 2009, 1-6
- Wolpert, D & Frith, C (2004), The Neuroscience of Social Interactions: Decoding, Influencing, and Imitating the Actions of Others. Oxford University Press
- Karmiloff, K & Karmiloff-Smith, A (2010), Getting to Know Your Baby: A parent's guide to early child development. London: Caroll & Brown.
