[baby babbling]
[cries]
[Rachel] I think she's quite frustrated,
'cause she's...
not able to move around yet,
but I think she desperately wants to be.
[Willow crying]
[man] Babies have hundreds of muscles.
[babbling]
[man] And at the beginning
is a big mixture
of unorganized stimuli
that they have no idea how to control.
[babbling continues]
And yet in a few weeks they manage
to follow objects with their eyes.
In a few months, they manage
to sit, to grasp objects.
[Adam] In there somewhere.
-They're in there somewhere.
-[Rachel] Know where the bridge is, Lily?
[Adam] Where are they?
[man] And what is a mystery
is to understand...
how is this complexity
continuously increasing?
[Adam] Where does that go?
Oh, where's it gone? There.
-[Rachel] That bit goes here.
-[Adam] Got it.
[Adam] In the mouth first.
Test it, does it work?
[woman] The most magical thing
about babies moving
is that during the first year of life...
a baby will learn more motor skills
than any other period.
[Rachel] I think so.
[woman] Things go so fast,
and there's so much to learn.
Are we born this way?
Are we born with innate
knowledge or skills?
[Adam] Yeah, aren't you clever?
[man] The world around a baby
is constantly moving.
But it's through other people's movements
that we are able to understand
how people feel,
what they intend to do,
and what they are doing at this moment.
And that really opens up the social world.
So how do babies learn to interact
and anticipate the movements of others?
How is that possible?
[woman] The first couple of weeks...
is literally...
he sort of wakes, he sleeps, he feeds...
What's that little face?
You change his nappy,
and you don't really get
that much interaction.
What have we got?
As we've headed into month two,
he's started doing a bit more.
You start to... sort of see, you know,
the next couple of weeks and months.
He's gonna to start sort of actually
playing with you and interacting properly,
which will be quite fun I think.
What are you dreaming about?
Hey.
Hey, buddy.
[Amelia] Hello. Yeah, hello?
-Hello.
-How are you?
Have a good day?
[Amelia] 4.69 kilos.
[Rich] Four point six nine?
Whoa, look at that muscle.
Yeah, he's got his walking legs on.
[Amelia]
We've noticed a bit of tracking.
[Pascoe coos]
[Amelia]
Rich started moving his head over,
and Pascoe sort of caught
his eye over here,
and then as Rich's head moved
all the way around,
he sort of kept eye contact
and moved his head as well.
[Rich] Hello. Good boy. And back.
Ready? Ready?
[Amelia] I'd love to know
what's going on in his head.
It's pretty amazing
that your brain can actually teach you
to do something like that.
It's pretty crazy.
[Rich] Over here.
Good boy.
Here I am.
Hey... hey... hey
[all laughing]
[woman] Ever since I can remember,
I've been really intrigued
by how people move,
how they control their movements.
My family, we're sports-crazy, really.
My father played professional football
in the Netherlands,
and so did my brother.
And many of my uncles and aunties,
they are PE teachers and are interested
in how children move.
[Van der Meer] When I was a PhD student
in the early '90s, the academic community
was convinced that newborn babies,
being born with an immature brain,
were incapable of producing
movements at will.
Uh, just capable of making
reflexive movements,
like the sucking reflex,
the blinking reflex.
The babies, you know,
they were just sitting and waiting
impatiently for their brains to mature.
And I just couldn't really believe it.
So I wanted to look for signs
that our babies are capable
of controlling their own movements
in a purposeful way.
[cooing, fussing]
[Van der Meer]
So here we have little Hjalmar.
-And he was born on the 21st of November?
-Yes.
[Van der Meer]
Was it an okay birth?
[chuckling]
Lots of drama, or...
-[woman] No, it was quite normal.
-Yeah.
So if we can go through...
Yes.
One of the first things
that newborn babies do
is they will make these arm movements
in front of their face.
Yeah, okay.
So, 4-7-80.
-[woman] Yeah.
-[Van der Meer] Good. Thank you.
I had this gut feeling.
There is actually some voluntary quality
to their movements,
even the early movements.
But it's very hard to detect.
Nobody had ever looked at that before.
We have a little baby bed
for Hjalmar to lie on.
We were thinking that in order to test
this theory, what we could do
was to try and pull the baby's arms
away from the face.
Hmm?
Are you going to lie on the bed for us?
Yes.
There we go.
We use neonates,
babies under 24 days of age.
Are you going to wave your arms for us?
Are you?
Yes.
This one, there we go.
Oh.
We attached small weights
to the end of strings
that were attached to the baby's wrists,
and these strings passed over pulleys.
There we go.
If the babies kept the arm on the side
their face was turned to up,
despite the forces pulling it away,
that would show that they are prepared
to fight weights
in order to keep seeing their arm.
You design an experiment
and you hope it will work,
but you never know.
We saw that the arm
the baby's face was turned to was kept up,
despite those weights.
Whereas the arm
the baby's head was turned away from
was pulled more and more down
in the direction of the toes,
the more weights we added.
This was not something you would expect
if these arm movements were just reflexes.
-[Van der Meer] Shall we?
-Yeah.
Can I borrow you?
Oh, you're such a big girl.
Yes, you're such a big girl.
In the womb there's no vision,
so I think in the very first weeks of life
what babies are doing
is linking movements
to vision of their movements.
And both of them together
trigger the development
of the baby's brain.
We can't expect
our newborn babies to know
that they have... arms at all.
For all they know,
they could have been born with wings
attached to their shoulders.
So we wrote up the paper and we were
expecting to be entering the hall of fame.
And then within a week, it came back.
Rejection.
The reviewer said the arm
they were looking at stayed up
not because the babies
wanted to look at it,
simply because it was more tense.
So we reckoned that if we take away
sight of both arms of the babies,
then this time you would expect
that both arms would
be pulled down by the weights.
We literally placed the babies
with their heads in a shoebox,
so they can't see their arm.
And this time, both arms were pulled down
the more weights we added.
What we found was that
babies are willing to work
to keep their arms up
in front of their face,
but only if they can see them.
We wrote another paper
and sent it off again.
But they say, "No. Babies aren't capable.
They aren't clever.
They are simple, primitive creatures."
I felt they were so inflexible
and so stuck in their ways.
So we really, really had to go back
to the drawing board.
[Adam] It's a nice place
for a picnic?
[Rachel] Put that on your lap. That's it.
You've got a lot to say.
[cooing]
[Rachel]
Are you letting me know what's what?
I've noticed that she's been moving
so much more now.
Her legs, like yesterday,
they were kicking so much
when I was speaking to her.
You're still in the monkey phase.
You're still being a little monkey,
grasping everything.
She's kinda responding
to us with her body as well.
I gave her a bath last night and noticed
that while she was in her bath seat,
she was wiggling
and moving her body so much that she was
slipping out and over the seat.
She grabs every--
My hair...
blankets...
bits of fluff.
You are picking a lot of things up
at the moment, aren't you?
I don't know if it's intentional,
whether it's just... her hand's there
and the item's there
and she's picking it up anyway.
What's the matter?
it's really nice having two.
Lily entertains Willow,
and Willow will just watch her for a bit.
And I can see their relationship
starting to grow a little bit.
In the mornings we'll wake up and...
Lily will ask where Willow is,
so she's in our lives now completely.
Yes.
My husband Ruud and I,
we have five children.
My first baby, Zoey, was born
halfway through our PhDs,
and I had this newborn baby
and a paper that was just rejected.
I really had to go quickly back to work
and use her in my experiments.
We put up a video camera above her cot.
Without making any sounds,
she started exploring her own hands.
And sometimes she would accidentally touch
one of the toys that were hanging over her
and she would look really surprised,
like, "Was that me touching this toy?"
This went on for, like, 45 minutes.
This was really exciting stuff,
seeing your own baby
confirming your gut feeling
that babies are using the first three
or four months of their lives
linking sight of their arms
to this feeling of moving their arms.
It really inspired me
to show once and for all
that this was what was going on.
We would prevent the baby
from seeing its own arms directly.
We would film the hand.
This time the baby could see
the hand the baby was facing away from
on the monitor.
-Can I borrow him?
-Yes.
Just a sec.
If babies really are interested
in their visual arm
then they would keep up this hand
that was visible on the monitor,
and the hand on the side of the body
the baby was facing would be pulled down
in the direction of the toes,
so you would expect
a complete reversal of results
from the first experiment.
We tested a number of babies
and we have this beautiful graph
where you see that all the arms
they can't see are pulled down...
and it's only the hand they can see
on the video monitor that stay up,
despite the weights.
And that was a result
that nobody could deny.
Newborn babies are capable of making
controlled movements at will.
Babies go on this incredible movement
journey right from the start.
That was brilliant.
Took out the champagne, literally,
and wrote up the paper,
and then we got it published into Science.
That was a big thing.
[Amelia] He gets very excited
when he makes a direct hit.
So Pascoe's latest trick is getting...
his legs up high and kicking
a little star.
I think he's gonna be
a future soccer player.
If we sat in the front room
and talked to him from the kitchen,
he would turn his head
and look up the corridor...
- towards you, which is cute.
-It's quite cool, yeah.
[rattling]
Yeah?
[rattling, shaking]
[Amelia] He's started
putting his hands out for things.
So, when he sees a toy that he wants...
It's sort of fun to watch him start
to realize that the things
at the end of his arms are his hands
and that he can sort of
grab things with them.
[Amelia] ♪ Pascoe loves peas
And he's six months old ♪
[Van der Meer] As soon as you know
what they are capable of,
you will start expecting
different things from these babies.
[Rich] Hello.
Come back up here.
Now go down there.
Yeah.
[Van der Meer]
When the baby is moving around, playing,
learning about itself,
learning about environment around it,
it's basically building
its own brain's infrastructure.
It's important to stimulate the baby,
to get the baby moving and interpreting
the world through movement.
Oh! Oh! Mr. Butterfly.
The number of connections
between brain cells,
and the quality of those connections,
are all dependent on the experiences
the baby is exposed to.
So the more varied experiences
a baby receives,
the better it's able to build
their own brain.
[man] I've always loved science fiction.
It's a fantastic way to explore ideas.
And this approach in science fiction
can also be used in science.
I am a researcher.
I bring together
artificial intelligence and psychology.
Babies are incredible learning machines.
By six months they can start to use
their hands to grasp objects.
And soon after, they will develop
fine motor skills with their fingers.
But I wanted to build a machine
to ask how babies learn
to move so quickly and so well.
It seems that there is some kind of
internal circuitry in the brain
that is pushing children to get
intrinsically by... new movements.
They are continuously self-challenging,
trying to explore what is just
beyond the skills they currently know.
This is what people call curiosity.
[baby giggling]
[Rachel] Look at you.
-[Willow coos]
-[Rachel laughs]
You're all sat up, sort of.
[Adam] Ta-da!
She's really good at sitting up now.
Hey.
You can sit up on the bed.
[Oudeyer]
At some point in development,
children discover and learn
how to sit by themselves.
[Adam] Is that funny, sitting up?
Ready.
Ahh... oh!
[Oudeyer] And it frees their hands.
And their hands being free,
they have a whole new world to discover.
And those hands become tools
that empower them
to discover even further
and newer space of their worlds.
-[Rachel] Ah, I see what you're doing.
-[toy chimes]
She doesn't just want
something to hold now.
She wants something that can be pressed,
and does do something.
[toy chimes]
Now a lot more things are not random
and they are purposefully done...
and is exciting. Is that exciting?
You are so proud, aren't you?
You love that, don't you?
[coos in excitement]
[Rachel] Now she's properly
exploring with her fingertips,
using every part of her finger to kinda--
prising it open.
Or like pressing buttons,
she knows that...
makes a sound,
so she'll carry on doing it.
She's getting so much better
actually... holding onto things.
With Lily there is that jostle between
both of them wanting the same toys.
Are you gonna let her have it back?
I think she'd love to be able to play
with Lily, but she's just too slow.
Yay. Well done, Willow.
[Oudeyer] In 2016, with my team,
we decided to set up this new experiment.
[speaking French]
What we wanted it to do is to isolate
the curiosity aspect of the baby's brain.
How do we try to approach
such a complicated challenge?
We tried to do that by using mathematical
equations to build mathematical models...
and then to model that into a robot.
As soon as you've written some kind of
artificial brain of the robot...
then you push the button
and the robot starts to move.
And then you can really observe
how the behavior develops.
[in French] I put three curious robots
here and three control robots here.
-Mm-hm.
-So you can see the difference.
[Oudeyer, in English] We have
an experiment where we want to compare
two different kinds
of learning mechanisms.
In the control group,
we externally define
a goal for the robot.
This robot will have the objective
to learn how to move the ball
in different directions.
One of the two joysticks, when moved
in the right way, will command this toy.
And this toy, in turn,
can potentially... push a ball.
If it moves a lot, it gets many points.
If it doesn't move, it gets no points.
In the other group, which we call
the "curiosity driven learning group,"
they are set free to explore
through curiosity
like real babies.
They generate some rewards
based on how much learning
they make with different objects.
To perceive the environment,
the robot is using cameras.
For example, there is one here.
And then he's also using some microphones
to detect sounds in the environments.
[in French] Let's go then.
[man, in French] It's launched.
[Oudeyer, in English]
Which group will discover first
the most sophisticated movements
to move the ball?
This is similar to what very young babies
are initially doing with their arms.
Waving them around in the air.
When we run this experiment and we observe
each of the robots learning and exploring,
there is always some form of uncertainty
about what is going to happen.
So, we are now a bit further
in the experiment.
And we begin to see some differences
among the two groups of robots.
On the row of curious robots,
they are actually
now spending part of their time
moving the two joysticks.
As we just saw, it produced
a little movement in the toy.
It's like fine-tuning the activation
of each individual muscle in the baby.
And so now, the control robots.
They have not learned
anything sophisticated.
The control robot...
its single objective was
to learn to move the ball,
and it doesn't know how to move the ball.
Here we have the curious robots
moving the right joystick
in a way that moves the toy, and then now
it's actually pushing the ball.
Basically, he has discovered that...
the joystick and the toy
can be used as a tool
to move the ball.
So that's a major discovery,
and he's doing that again.
So result of the match? It's very clear,
that the winners are the curious robots.
Being curious,
being free to explore,
is the fastest and most efficient way
to learn skills in the real world.
An interesting relation with babies is
that babies are never provided
with specific tasks to solve.
They really do whatever they want.
Sometimes it might actually
be counterproductive
to incentivize them
to solve specific problems.
Let them explore freely.
[Rich] Well, so much for
your 10:00 p.m. bedtime.
I know.
I know.
Daddy kept me up talking all night.
-There she goes.
-Bye, sugarplum.
Oh, she can't stop giving you kisses.
-Mate... Mate.
-Take lots of pictures.
-See you soon.
-Bye, Mom.
Bye, Mom, bye.
[Amelia] Mwah.
[Rich] Up, up, up.
Get him. Get him. Yeah.
There he is there.
Definitely testing things.
Exploring.
That's what he's doing. Exploring
with his hands and his eyes.
Well done.
[Rich imitating airplane sounds]
You got it.
Previously it was his eyes, 'cause he'd
just look around and take things in.
Now he's knowing, "Right,
I can actually reach for those things,
I can grab those things."
And they've got a feel to them,
not just a taste or a look.
Baked beans for dinner.
This is gonna be fun. You'll like these.
You just want them now.
Yes, you want them now.
[Rich humming]
Look at that.
I think his right hand, pincer grip,
that he's got ready for action,
is a little bit better than his left one,
where he just kinda grabs.
Right, he's getting frustrated
'cause he can't get as many as he wants.
Yeah, you got one. Good boy.
I like these moments,
because you're bloody proud as a parent.
Come on, son.
How are they, mate? Good?
I enjoy every minute with him,
'cause I do know that in a few weeks,
I'm gonna get back to work.
I'm kinda just savoring it
as much as possible.
Buddy.
What's that outside?
-[Rich] Huh, whoo!
-[blinds being pulled]
Look outside.
What's all that out there?
It's white everywhere and coming down
from the sky, from those big dark clouds.
See?
Snow, snow, snow. Look, buddy.
Ooh.
We've got a xylophone in the park.
When I first took him there,
he just kinda watched me do it.
And I think that's all it takes,
is a bit of,
you know, registering how something works
with him before he begins to understand,
"Right, that's how that works."
[playing xylophone]
[both laugh]
[playing scales]
He does have these moments
where he will deliberately
and purposefully, you know,
make the same actions
that he's seeing someone else do,
which is really cool.
It is cold, mate,
but you wanna have a go?
Someone's excited.
Good boy. Ding, ding, ding.
[ding]
Go on. Yes.
Good boy.
[notes sounding]
Good boy.
He is clearly trying to get
as much sound out of it as possible.
That's cool. It's really cool to watch.
-Should we start from here?
-[notes sounding]
Good boy.
[man] I have three children,
and all of my kids have really
sort of helped me shape my work.
There is a point early on when
they really start to get captivated
by other people's movements
and what other people do.
I've always been interested
in movement,
and how movement is being
controlled by the body and the brain,
but even so, I think what was
more important for my work
and my interests
is how it comes about that we're able
to understand the movements of others.
Imagine if adults had no way
of anticipating the movements of others.
We'd constantly bump into each other,
and all social interactions
would be impossible to perform.
[speaking indistinctly]
-[object splashes]
-[all laughing]
[in Swedish] Think it'll come out
the other side?
-Unless it collides with the rock.
-What if it gets stuck?
It would collide with the rock.
[Gredeback, in English] When a child
throws a stick on one side of a bridge
and then runs over to the other side
to see that it reappears...
-[in Swedish] Can you see it?
-No.
I can almost see it.
[Gredeback, in English] The child knows
that the stick will continue to move,
they know it continues
to exist, even though they can't see it.
-[in Swedish] Is it stuck?
-Maybe it got stuck.
Look, there it is. There.
[in English] For older kids,
maybe it has to do with
anticipating when the stick will appear
and how it will look.
But even for younger children,
this is a challenge they need to handle,
the ability to represent things,
even though they're not present,
and try to calculate
where things will be in the future.
This could be a child's mother
or a ball rolling on a plane,
or really any other type of activity
that you need
to pay attention to and track.
Babies are not born with the ability
to anticipate. They have to learn.
And I found that fascinating and I really
wanted to find out when this happens.
[Gredeback] In 2006,
we recorded a movie where an adult
picks up ba*ls and puts them in a bucket.
And then we showed this
to babies and adults.
What we could see is that the adults
looked at the ball and the hand
then looked at the bucket
before the ball arrived.
They were able to anticipate
what's going to happen.
But what really sort of shook us all up
was that the babies were doing the same.
So one-year-old babies performed...
almost identical to the adults.
They looked at the ball,
the hand,
then they made a saccade,
an eye movement, over to the bucket
before the ball arrived,
foreseeing the future.
How is that possible?
That was, to me, shocking,
and really, really exciting.
So it turned out that the 12-month-olds
could anticipate this action.
The six-month-olds did not.
So our hypothesis at the time
was that young babies' understanding
of other people's actions
is very much based on
their own experiences.
In 2010, me and my colleague really
wanted to look more into this idea
that infants' understanding of others
are grounded
and based in their own experiences.
So...
The idea is that when you
come into the lab
there's going to be two girls
feeding each other with bananas.
And as they are doing this,
you and your child would watch this.
We will measure the kids'
eye movements with a camera,
so we can use that to see how the kids...
perceive these events
and how they interpret them.
We had two different types of actions.
In one case, it would be
a typical kind of eating situation
where one adult would feed
another with bananas.
The other situation was, uh, weird.
One of the actors would take
banana on their spoon,
but not put the spoon
in the mouth of the other person,
but rather put it on
the back of their hands.
And they would lean forward
and eat from the back of their hand,
the whole idea being that
this would be an action
that the babies had not seen before.
No one should be able to anticipate this.
And you turn right...
All the way down the corridor.
So we started off with one-year-olds
and six-month-olds,
and later added four-month-olds,
which would give us some kids
with very limited experience
and others with a lot
of experience being fed with this.
Welcome into the lab.
[woman] Thank you.
Here's a seat for you and Maxwell.
So what's gonna happen now is that
Per will first calibrate the system.
This is an eye tracker, and in here
you have several cameras
recording Maxwell's eyes.
But for the system to calculate
where he's looking,
Per needs to sort of get his attention
at certain points...
uh, and then the camera records
how his eyes look at those things.
And once that is done,
then we will start the experiment.
[speaking quietly to Maxwell]
Maxwell. Hey, look up here.
What's really nice about the eye tracking
is that we can get
a very good and detailed understanding
of how a baby views the world,
millisecond to millisecond.
We can see if the baby does have
an expectation about what is to come,
because then their eye movements
will look ahead in time to future events.
Like that.
Got the tracker.
-Hi, Maxwell.
-Hey, Maxwell.
[laughs]
[woman 1] Hi. I'm hungry.
-Can I have some?
-Yes.
Here it comes.
[Gredeback] When we started the study,
it was interesting to see
the youngest infants,
four and six months of age,
they were very attentive to this,
they followed along
in the events as they occurred,
but they very, very rarely
looked ahead in time.
[woman 2] Here it comes.
[woman 1] Mmm.
Thank you.
Now, I'm full.
-Hey, Ben.
-Hi, Ben.
Hi.
-Hey.
-Hi.
Hey, Ben.
-Hey.
-Hey.
When a baby becomes a bit older,
and has sufficient experience being fed,
what happens is that they start to look
across the table to the other person
before the spoon arrives.
They start to stay
a little bit ahead of time,
looking at places where things
will happen in the future.
I have something yummy.
[Gredeback] We can see this
in some instances at 9 and 10 months,
but it's really at 12 months that this
becomes a very clear pattern.
-Can I have some?
-Yes.
Here it comes.
[Gredeback]
Even within older age groups,
babies that have been fed a lot
and for a long period of time
were better able to anticipate
than babies of the same age
that did not have the same
amount of experience.
Can I have some more?
Yes.
Here it comes.
-[woman 2] Can I have some more?
-[woman 1] Yes.
Here it comes.
[Gredeback] So in our control condition,
this strange or weird feeding,
it turned out that babies independent
of age were not able to anticipate this.
They never looked
at the hand ahead of time.
Even though we show the same events
time and time again,
it's not something they learn.
Everything they've
experienced in their life
suggests that the food
should go to the mouth.
Here it comes.
The story for anticipation is very simple.
It seems to be
an experience-dependent process.
Thank you. Now I'm full.
These results were really nice
because they supported our claims.
But we got these enormous streams of data.
There was this strange column in the data
that I'd never paid attention to,
which measures the diameter of the pupil.
So I started to go into the library
and pick up books from the '70s and '80s.
In those books there was
a lot of studies suggesting the idea
that the pupil is not just
a way to control the amount
of light that goes into the eye.
It seems like the pupil is also
responding to changes in attention.
So if you're very much attending
to something, your pupils dilate.
That made me very intrigued.
There was something going on here
that I didn't expect,
and did not understand.
There you go. One for you.
I've got to go to work in 12 minutes.
[Amelia] Hi, baby.
[Rich] Look. There is Mom.
There is Mom.
-[Amelia] Want me to take over?
-Yeah, if that's alright.
What're we gonna have
after our porridge?
Oh, almost.
[blows raspberries]
[Rich] It's been awesome, kind of just--
how I'm tracking what he's doing.
[Rich] You want the spoon?
You can take the spoon if you want.
He's really purposeful
with what he wants to do
while he's sitting in his high chair.
Pascoe's at the point now where
he knows there's gonna be
a reaction to one of his actions.
Can I have that? Thank you, delicious.
Guess what, matey?
I'm gonna go.
Oh, no.
[Rich exhales heavily]
Do you have porridge on your face?
Give me a toasty kiss.
-Have a good go.
-Mm-hmm.
Gonna miss you, mate.
-See you tonight for bath time?
-[Amelia] Bye-bye.
Well, yeah.
Bath time. Bath time, yeah.
See ya, buddy.
Have a good day. See you guys.
-Love you.
-Bye. Love you.
[door closing]
I think it's nice to see how inquisitive
and sort of how curious he is.
Good.
He's at the stage
where he understands a lot now.
He understands a ball is a ball
and if he picks it up and throws it,
it'll bounce and roll.
Oh, headbutting it.
[Amelia]
He's understanding these objects,
and then interacting with them as well,
which is quite nice.
Which one do you want, Pascoe?
Which one? Which one?
The shiny one, or the--
Yes! Rugby wins.
[Amelia] Also the further
you get along all these milestones,
you start to see
a real personality emerge.
So, they've gone from a little sort of
helpless baby to someone who,
for example, who loves ba*ls.
And you can see that personality
starting to emerge,
and seeing who Pascoe's
gonna be when he's older.
[Gredeback] We've been claiming
this for several years,
that babies require a lot of experience
to anticipate what's going to happen,
but there was
this really interesting pattern
in the change in the size of the pupil.
I started to plot that. I don't know why.
For some reason I did.
And something fantastic emerged.
What we can see is that
whenever the babies saw
the normal, typical feeding events,
the pupils didn't give us much.
But when we presented this odd
or a bit strange feeding situation,
every time the spoon was
being brought over the table,
the pupils dilated.
It was like a straight line going...
[whooshes]
[whoosh]
Regardless of age, pretty much all
of the kids got this spike in the pupil.
I just had no way of explaining.
It was really intriguing.
We went back to look at the data.
A really beautiful pattern emerged
that we had not expected.
[woman] Here it comes.
[Gredeback]
Every time the feeding was done in a way
that the children were not expecting,
they became surprised.
The pupil dilation comes when
you get really, really surprised.
It's like the children
every time would go... [gasps]
Then they calmed down again.
And the next time the spoon
went across the table... [gasps]
It was a very powerful reaction
from the babies.
The four-month-olds, as well as
the six-month-olds and the one-year-olds,
showed the very same pupillary pattern
even though they differed very much
in the degree
to which they anticipated the actions.
Now, the interesting thing is that
surprise requires that you have an idea,
a notion about what's going to happen.
So even the four-month-olds
did have an idea, an expectation.
It wasn't as explicit
so they made an eye movement,
but it was in their mind,
and we were able to capture that.
[Lily] Whee!
Careful.
Help.
Are you stuck? She's stuck.
Oh, where's Lily?
Where's Lily?
[Lily] Peekaboo!
[Gredeback] As adults,
we constantly anticipate
all aspects of the world.
[Lily] Peekaboo!
-[Willow laughs]
-I think that's funny.
[both laughing]
Being able to read other people
and understand their movements
is really foundational...
and we take it for granted.
But for a baby,
this is something they have to learn.
So as parents, we really need to provide
the opportunities for young babies
to explore their world,
to act, and to move.
[Rich] Lily, look. What about that one?
It's the way they learn about themselves,
and it's the way they learn
about other people.
So through movement,
they build the world.
-[Adam] Ding, ding, ding.
-[Rachel] Put our hands up? We're going.
[Rachel] Willow's got an amazing grip.
-Is she holding on?
-Yeah, she's holding on.
Yeah, you do. You're getting
really good at holding on.
When you feel like it.
[Rachel] On the carousel,
she was holding on really well,
and then as it picks up speed
she just let go. Like, completely let go.
Oh, my god.
[Adam] She kind of embraces everything,
finds everything really fun.
-Is she alright?
-Yeah.
Isn't that funny? Isn't that funny?
[Adam] Come on then. Back home it is.
[Rachel] One more...
Or are you finished for the day as well?
[Van der Meer]
During the first year of life,
babies go on this
incredible movement journey,
learning about their own bodies
and what they are capable of.
The baby is intrinsically motivated
to learn about the world,
to learn about itself, and to start...
interacting with the world.
[Amelia] Catch the water.
Yeah.
[Oudeyer]
Curiosity appears to be really fundamental
in the discovery and learning
babies are doing every day.
[Amelia] Whoosh.
Ready, and...
splash.
[Oudeyer]
They are continuously self-challenging,
continuously trying to explore what is
just beyond...
the skills they currently know.
[Gredeback] Being around these curious,
exciting, young individuals
who are growing up
and learning about the world,
that's inspiring.
But it also allows us to ask
these very fundamental questions
about what we have
with us from the beginning
and how we are shaped
by experiences we have.
I do think that the key to understanding
these questions lies early in infancy.
-[Rich] That's your ball.
-[Amelia] Oh, yeah. Thank you.
There we go.
I would like to shout it
from the rooftops.
Young babies are so much more intelligent
and aware of what is happening
around them.
Please don't underestimate
these wonderful creatures.
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