Yesterday’s
post was on the implications of imitative gazing, and today the gaze monitors
are back with their electronics to check out young gazers. 6 or 8-month old
children don’t have much in the way of tools to take charge of their
environment, but that’s not going to stop them.
The
power of the baby’s stare is the subject of this week’s contribution to the
Public Library of Science by Wang et al (1). Their experimental program worked with
infants and TV screens. The first thing they tried was showing a red spot in
one corner of the screen. If the infant stared at it, a nice picture of an
animal appeared on the screen for a second or two. It reappeared on the screen
if the dot was again fixed by the beady baby eye.
The
electronic eye tracking equipment worked out where the infant was looking and
the 6-month old children quickly worked out how to bring up the picture. The
8-month old ones were even quicker to catch on.
So
far so good, but our seekers after truth thought maybe the kids were only
staring at the dot because there was nothing else to look at, so now the became
devious. They displayed two identical dots in opposite corners, but only one
would bring up an animal experience. The animal picture this time faded slowly
instead of just switching off. Presumably, this made the picture more
desirable.
Again
the kids quickly learned which spot to stare at and so control their rather
limited environment. As a control, a group of adults were given the same test.
It turned out that only half the adults worked out that one of the spots was a
control mechanism. The other half were confused as to what was going on.
So
what have we learned? It seems that in the cradle we learn that we can control
our environment by merely staring at something. We’re familiar with the game of
fetch. The baby throws the toy out of the cradle, and looks at it, and we rush
to retrieve it and then we go round again.
Later
on, we play the baby’s role when we take our dog out for a walk. Our dogs are
usually willing players, but sometimes they play the other role and just sit there
looking at where you threw the ball until you fetch it.
