Next time you have the chance to, play Peek-A-Boo with a month year old, now with the knowledge behind what makes it so entertaining for them. I always played pick-a-boo with babies, I just thought they found it funny. I also found that peek-a-boo is a way for communicating for babies. Once a baby laughs, it is nearly impossible to not laugh back. By laughing back you are communicating in a way that the babies can understand.
Sites at Penn State. Looked at this way, the game isn't just a joke, but helps babies test and re-test a fundamental principle of existence: that things stick around even when you can't see them.
Maybe evolution fixed it so that babies enjoy peekaboo for its own sake, since it proved useful in cognitive development, but I doubt it. Something deeper than mere education is going on. Peekaboo uses the fundamental structure of all good jokes - surprise, balanced with expectation. Researchers Gerrod Parrott and Henry Gleitman showed this in tests involving a group of six-, seven- and eight-month-olds which sound like more fun than a psychology experiment should be.
Most of the time the peekaboo game proceeded normally, however on occasion the adult hid and reappeared as a different adult, or hid and reappeared in a different location.
Videos of the infants were rated by independent observers for how much the babies smiled and laughed. What's more, the difference between their enjoyment of normal peekaboo and trick-peekaboo increased with age with the eight-month-olds enjoying the trick trials least. The researchers' interpretation for this is that the game relies on being able to predict the outcome.
As the babies get older their prediction gets stronger, so the discrepancy with what actually happens gets larger - they find it less and less funny. This shows that surprise only takes us so far when trying to understand the global appeal of peekaboo. The real magic of laughter and peekaboo is how they connect babies to other people. Babies are born social; there is nothing more fascinating to them than other people.
There is nothing more enigmatic, either. The best thing about the game, for babies, is that you are playing with them. You are playing it as equals, and to play it effectively you must give them your full attention, and they find this in your eyes.
Peekaboo is all about eye gaze: a potent signal that is central to our social interactions. Any adult should recognize this. Just think about a time you swapped glances with a potential romantic partner, and the rush of reward if the glance was reciprocated, became a mutual gaze.
Eye contact has a powerful effect on all of us. Even newborns will turn towards faces that are looking directly at them. The shape and colouration of our eyes let us signal to each other who and what we are looking at. Out of eighty-eight primate species, humans are the only one with exposed, white sclera. Mutual gaze is mutually rewarding.
But turning gaze into a form of communication is a skill that we must master. One disarming thing about small babies is how they can hold your gaze for such a long time. Enter a staring context with a small baby, and you will usually lose. The game relates to a concept called object permanence. Melanie Potock, a pediatric speech language pathologist, describes it as the ability to remember an object or person even when it is not in sight.
Object permanence typically develops around the 6-to-8 month mark. Before that, a baby may still enjoy peekaboo but think you have actually disappeared when you put your hands over your face or cover yourself with a blanket. Once object permanence develops, she enjoys it because she's waiting for you to come out of hiding.
Peekaboo is a form of reciprocal play. By 2 or 3 months, babies start to recognize and react to human emotions. You show signs of happy emotions when you remove your hands and cry "peekaboo! If you make a negative face, baby may not respond as positively. The game also reinforces the cognitive skills of consistency and contingency.
It's played the same way consistency , and the baby must respond socially contingency for the parents to keep it going, Potock said. The consistency helps a baby make key cognitive connections. From there, the baby learns how to respond to the game to help continue the fun.
He learns his part so well that he'll do that even if the other player isn't mom or dad. In many ways, peekaboo becomes a form of conversation between you and your little one.
0コメント