Did you know that…..
A recent study (January 2011), published by Science, affirms that infants (from 10 to 13-month-old ) recognize when two agents have conflicting goals, and that they use the agents’ relative size to predict the outcome of the dominance between them ?.
Lotte Thomsen, Susan Carey, and others studied a cohort of 144 infants participants. The investigators concluded the following: “These results suggest that preverbal infants mentally represent social dominance and use a cue that covaries with it phylogenetically, and marks it metaphorically across human cultures and languages, to predict which of two agents is likely to prevail in a conflict of goals “.
That study, entitled “Big and mighty: preverbal infants mentally represent social dominant “, has been carried out by investigators of the Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark ; Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, Department of Anthropology, University of California, USA.
