Babies Learn to Predict Behavior at About a Year Old

June 19, 2006 — -- To most parents, babies are a terrific mystery -- no one knows what lurks in their tiny heads or what they are doing with their flailing arms.

Researchers now say that from the eyes of a young infant, parents are just as mysterious and confusing, because according to a new study, babies younger than 6 months old cannot predict what another person is trying to do.

Swedish researchers studied 6-month-old babies, 1-year-old babies and adults, all of whom watched a video of a hand placing toys into a bucket. The 1-year-old babies and adults quickly learned to shift their gazes to the bucket when the hand picked up a toy, indicating they knew what the hand was about to do.

But the 6-month-olds did not shift their gaze. Researchers speculate that the brain uses specific neural wiring to make predictions about how people might act. At 6 months old, babies' brains don't have that wiring yet.

The findings won't help parents calm crying babies any quicker, but they might shed some light on the situation. For example, if Mommy picks up a favorite toy, a 6-month-old infant wouldn't guess that she intends to hand that toy over, even if she has done that before.

In other words, newborns do not really understand when their parents are trying to help them.

This study reminds us that babies younger than 6 months have a hard time figuring out what we intend to do, "so it is important not to misinterpret their behavior as manipulative or demanding of attention," said Dr. John Constantino, a pediatric psychiatry professor at the Washington University School of Medicine.

By the time infants are a year old, they can more easily understand how the people around them might behave.

For example, researchers found that if a 1-year-old infant saw Mommy's hand pick up a ball, he would expect Mommy to drop the ball into a bucket, because he has seen her do that before.

Researchers explain that at 12 months, the infant's brain has developed enough to understand that if he'd picked up the ball, he would put it in the bucket himself.