Did you know that…..

A recent study, 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.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)