“They’re not just smiling randomly”, said Javier Movellan, a research scientist in California and one of the study’s authors.
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This study builds on a previous study, which examined 13 moms and their kids; in 11 of these pairs, the child smiled before her mom. In this study, the tool helped the researchers reverse engineer the babies’ goals based exclusively on their observed behavior.
Why do babies smile when they interact with their parents?
You will be surprised to know that babies are as clever as comedians in bringing happiness and exert minimum amount of effort to make it happen.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the study is part of a program that uses robots to get fresh insight into human development.
The study used a robot programmed to act like a baby and had it interact with students. The findings showed that babies smile to get their mother or other caregiver to smile back, not simply to imitate them.
“We are not claiming that a particular cognitive mechanism, for instance conscious deliberation, is responsible for the observed behaviors”. And while moms may want to smile with their children, babies don’t participate for no reason at all – and no more than they need to. The robot babies were able to provoke the same reactions from the students as the mothers who had been with their real-life babies. Diego San interacted with 32 UC San Diego undergraduates individually during three-minute sessions where it displayed one of four different behaviors. Although Diego-san has a fairly robot-like body, its baby-like face is capable of reproducing a wide range of expressions in response to external stimuli.
“We found that infant (and mother) timed their smiles in a sophisticated manner that demonstrated mastery of the statistics of social interaction”.
Paul Ruvolo at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts, and his team programmed the robot to produce smiles with the same timing as a 4-month-old infant.
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“That is, infants had the goal of creating and maintaining states in which they were being smiled at (by their mothers) but were not smiling themselves”, explain the researchers. “Here we find that infants have their own goals in the interaction, even before four months of age”.
