They looked longer and paid more attention to scenario that violates the transitive inference to figure out why it is different from what they predicted

of making transitive inference about social hierarchy of dominance as early as 10 months old

used puppets to see how babies respond to social situations

Don't let the googly eyes or bewildered look fool you, babies are smarter than they seem.

New research has found that babies are capable of working out social hierarchies as early as 10 months old.

In a non-verbal experiment with puppets, they responded to different scenarios that suggested they knew which characters were more dominate than others.

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Emory University found babies are capable of making transitive inferences about social hierarchy of dominance as early as 10 months, in a study that used puppets playing out different scenarios.

'We found that within the first year of life, children can engage in this type of logical reasoning, which was previously thought to be beyond their reach until the age of about four or five years,' says Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University who led the study.

In the first experiment, babies were shown a video of three puppets, an elephant, a bear and a hippopotamus, arranged in a row.

Each one similar in size, but positioned left to right social hierarchy.

In the first scenario, the elephant is holding a toy and the bear reaches over and grabs it, which suggests the bear is the more dominate than the elephant and the hippo is more dominate than the bear.

The babies were then shown a scenario where the elephant takes the toy from the hippo, which captures most of the infants' attention longer than any of the other scenarios.

'Dominance by the elephant violates the expected transitive-inference relationship, since the bear took the toy from the elephant and the hippo took the toy from the bear,' Lourenco explains.

BABIES CAN SEPARATE SPEECH FROM GIBBERISH Athena Vouloumanos of New York University played a series of recordings for a group of nine-month-old babies. The recordings included a wide array of noises, all of which could be divided into four sections. First, babies heard a female voice saying words like 'truck' and 'dinner.' Second, they heard a parrot mimicking human speech. Third and fourth, the kids heard human non-speech (throat clearing, whistling) and parrot sounds. While they focused on this eclectic mix tape, the babies were shown pictures of checkerboards, human faces, and a cup (basically, this was an avant-garde art show). By noting how long babies stared at the images, scientists could tell if the kids comprehended what they were hearing. For example, when babies heard words spoken by a human, they stared at the pictures for a long time. They didn't have a problem identifying the sound of a real person. As for the human sound effects, when the babies heard coughs and hacks, they didn't pay any attention to the images on screen. They could easily tell the difference between language and gibberish. Advertisement

'The babies look longer and pay greater attention to the scenario that violates the transitive inference as they try to figure out why it is different from what they would have predicted.'

In the second part of the experiment, researchers introduced a giraffe as the fourth character.

However, the infants did not pay more attention to the scenarios with this new character because it was not interacting with the other puppets during the familiarization phase, even if it displayed more dominance.

The data revealed that most of the infants who were shown unexpected dominance behaviors, or 23 out of 32, were engaging in transitive inference when they saw scenarios of unexpected behavior by the puppets, compared to other scenarios.

The researchers concluded that that transitive inference for social dominance is evolutionary important, so the mechanisms to support this type of logical reasoning are part of our early development.

New research has found that babies are capable of making transitive inferences about social hierarchy of dominance as early as 10 months old. In a non-verbal experiment with puppets, the tiny tots responded to different scenarios that suggested they knew which characters were more dominate than others

'It's remarkable that the infants could make these inferences about social dominance with minimal presentation,' said Regina Paxton Gazes, a psychologist from Bucknell University who designed the non-verbal experiment for infants and assisted in the study.

'It suggests an early emerging, and perhaps evolutionary ancient ability, that is shared with other animals.'

Not only is this data significant in learning about how the mind develops, it could also help determine where infants are on track in the learning process.

'Since a majority of babies show the ability to engage in this kind of logical problem solving, our paradigm could certainly become an important tool for assessing normative cognitive development,' Lourenco says.

Puppets were also used in an experiment conducted earlier this year to determine if infants are able to comprehend complex situations.