Your toddler is more intelligent that you thought!

A new study published in the journal Infant Behaviour Development shows that babies as young as 10-months old can also identify the difference between paths taken by animate and inanimate objects. So basically, your infant could probably understand that a dog can jump over a fence while a school bus cannot.

Researchers observed 350 babies participating at 10, 12, 16 and 20 months to find out do they actually begin to understand the that animals and objects follow different paths of motion. According to the researchers, categorising things as animate or inanimate objects is a fundamental cognitive ability that allows infants to better understand the world around them.

The researchers used a technique called the ‘visual habituation paradigm,’ in order to measure how long the babies looked at a given object. According to them babies look at new things longer than things they are already familiar to.

Since computer animations of a bus or a table jumping over a wall held the attention of infants for longer than a bus or table bumping into a wall, it indicated the former was newer to them than the latter.

In contrast, infants’ attention was held just as well by a cat jumping over a wall as by a cat rebounding after running into a wall, indicating that infants think that cats can both jump and rebound.

‘Animals do bump into objects — if I’m not paying attention to where I’m going, I’ve been known to bump into things. The bigger picture is that the motion of objects is more predictable than the motion of animals. This research shows that even 10-month-old babies have some understanding of this,’ said Baker.

Source:PTI

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Your toddler is more intelligent that you thought!