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Babies learn who to trust at early age

Judge of character You can fool them once, but babies will not be fooled again if adults trick them, according to a new Canadian study.

Infants normally mimic sounds, facial expressions and actions they observe but researchers at Concordia University in Montreal found that if an adult tricks them, they will no longer follow along with that person.

The findings published in the journal Infant Behavior and Development bolster previous evidence that infants can differentiate between credible and un-credible sources, the study says.

"Like older children, infants keep track of an individual's history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to guide their subsequent learning," says Professor Diane Poulin-Dubois, a researcher at Concordia's department of psychology.

"Specifically, infants choose not to learn from someone who they perceive as unreliable."

To demonstrate this, experimenters looked inside a container while expressing excitement and invited infants aged 13 to 16 months to discover whether the box actually contained a toy or was empty. This task was designed to show the experimenters credibility or lack thereof.

The same experimenters then used their forehead, instead of their hands, to turn on a push-on light, hoping the infant would follow suit.

The results showed that only 34 per cent of infants paired with unreliable testers followed the task, while 61 per cent of infants whose testers were reliable imitated the behaviour.

"This shows infants will imitate behaviour from a reliable adult," says study co-author and PhD student Ivy Brooker. "In contrast, the same behaviour performed by an unreliable adult is interpreted as irrational or inefficient, therefore not worth imitating."