Photo: flickr/Diamond Farah
If you're like most people, when a baby smiles at you, you smile back. If you're these scientists, though, you carefully record the baby's smiles in order to build a creepy baby-simulating robot (complete with a face that only a scientist could love -- see figure below). In the process of building the robot, the authors of this study found that by 4 months, babies and their mothers fall into a predictable smiling routine: "mothers consistently attempted to maximize the time spent in mutual smiling, while infants tried to maximize mother-only smile time." When the "sophisticated child-like robot" copied the smile timings of real babies, it also maximized the smiling of the adults it interacted with. A disembodied robot baby head that manipulates you -- in stores just in time for Christmas! (We dearly hope!)
Infants Time Their Smiles to Make Their Moms Smile "One of the ...
