From taking their very first steps to saying their first words, the new Netflix docu-series “Babies” follows the development of infants as they navigate through their first year of life. The 12-episode collection features research led by Dr. Kiley Hamlin, director of the UBC Centre for Infant Cognition and an associate professor of psychology.
“‘Babies,’ as a series, is looking at infant development from many different perspectives. Different episodes deal with different topics of development, so, for example, walking and crawling versus language development and understanding people … each episode looks at a different facet,” she said.
The series blends current research in the realm of infant development with anecdotal experiences of individual babies as they embark on the most elemental of cognitive journeys to learn about the world.
Hamlin’s research, featured in the social relationships episode, looks at infant understanding of good and bad social interactions, particularly in terms of helping and harming.
“We bring infants into the lab and we show them different kinds of interactions … typically, those interactions involve one character needing help and another character providing that help, versus a third character harming the character who needs help … we do many different versions of that same idea … and infants watch these shows, and then we simply ask which character they prefer, at the end, to interact with.”
Hamlin’s research works with infants as young as three months and most research is conducted within the infant’s first 24 months. Their work indicates that, generally, babies seem to respond in ways that show greater preference for helpers over harmers.
“The kinds of behaviours that humans might be most attuned to understanding are those that are immediately relevant to them in terms of their survival … if babies can understand anything, they should probably understand actions that might cue whether someone’s going to help them or harm them.”
The research shows that not only do babies seem to understand how people act and what actions of other people might be, but they also seem to observe and understand how individuals interact. Infants potentially attribute positive and negative associations to those interactions and use them to interpret their own personal preferences.
“The work that we do suggests that babies have a stronger or more sophisticated understanding of the social world than we previously thought.”
Hamlin has begun a longitudinal project to study more about infant cognition with babies as young as hours after birth. It involves investigating interest in social stimuli, such as faces, and perception of the emotions of others, as well as monitoring helper preferences in efforts to study long-term individual differences. In particular, the researchers want to determine if early observations during infancy are predictive and relevant to later development, for instance, in terms of future moral judgements.
“You could imagine that very early and very basic knowledge about the social world could really impact the trajectory of one’s social development.”
Hamlin said that working with Netflix to communicate her research to viewers was a fun experience that used infant science to tell a good story about babies.
“You’re interacting with them in such a way that you can ask really deep questions about human nature … infant science is just this funny and great combination of important and rigorous science but also highly entertaining and at times heart-warming.”