Do Babies Know When They’re Skyping?

Grandparents, take heart! Research suggests your little dumplings know they're interacting with you in a way that's more profound than watching Sesame Street.

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  Long before most babies toddle or talk, they begin to make sophisticated inferences about the world around them. By as youthful as three months old, newborns can form expectations based on physical principles like gravity, speed, and momentum.

  Scientists at several universities told me they now have evidence, to the likely delight of far-flung grandparents everywhere, that infants can also tell the difference inbetween, say, a broadcast of Mister Rogers and a movie call with their actual grandfather. The capability to discern inbetween movie broadcast and video-based talk from infancy, which researchers have only recently confirmed, could have a profound effect on our understanding of how the human brain develops—and specifically, how technologies can play a role in shaping abstract concepts early on.

  “Babies who are pretty youthfull are able to pick up, in particular, whether or not an adult is actually responding to them in real time,” said Elisabeth McClure, a researcher who concentrates on children and media at Georgetown University. “Some television shows attempt to imitate this. You see, for example, with Elmo, or on Blue’s Clue’s, they look directly at the camera and pretend to interact with the child. There’s evidence that babies can tell the difference as early as six months old.”

  This is meaningful for a few reasons, not least of which is cultural. Extended families are increasingly spread across greater geographic distances. Movie calls are how many babies very first meet their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and other people who love them. Video-chat technologies, then, have major implications for how humans perceive key relationships.

  While interfaces like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are still relatively fresh, this area of research builds on decades of experiments involving children and electronic screens. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects youthfull children, and how well children can learn from watching educational programming, but scientists are only just beginning to figure out how babies understand screen interactions with another person in real time.

  “There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, said that the latest findings help illustrate how the concept of “screen time” is too broad. “Given the plethora of screens and uses for those screens that we have now, I think that we have to be a little sanguine about how much we can extrapolate,” he said.

  Of course, babies being babies, it’s hard to know what they’re thinking just by watching how they act. “Just because they stare at a screen doesn’t mean they are interpreting it, decoding it, understanding it,” Rich said. “Can a baby decode the pattern of light and dark on a two-dimensional object as a symbol of Grandma’s face, and perceive that the noise they hear is generated by Grandma talking to them?”

  Back at Georgetown, McClure and her team conducted a survey across Washington, D.C., asking parents of infants and toddlers how many of them had ever participated in a movie talk like FaceTime. “Eighty-five percent of the families that we surveyed who have babies under two said they had ever used it,” McClure said. “And almost forty percent said they used it once a week. Not only are they using [this technology], but they use it a lot.”

  And not only that—these talks were remarkably long, often lasting for twenty minutes or more. And many parents of youthfull children reported using movie talk with their kids even tho’ the kids weren’t permitted to see television. “Even families who avoid movie exposure,” McClure said, “they make an exception for movie talk.”

  As a doctoral student, McClure spent much of her time observing families with their babies during these movie calls. In particular, she wished to assess how they coped with the limitations of streaming movie talk, which can be glitchy and inconsistent. Even when the conversations are technologically flawless, the format itself disrupts many of the cues that help babies understand what’s going on in a face-to-face interaction. “Babies are very sensitive to eye contact, physical contact, pointing at things, and all of those can be compromised,” McClure said.

  “How are babies perceiving reality?”

  For example, babies watching television or movies tend to be confused when broadcast sound is even slightly out of sync. “A 4-month-old can scarcely hold their head up but if there’s a gauze delay, they’re not as responsive and they get upset by it,” said Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. “Really little babies pick up on the social responsiveness of a person. If there’s something wacky about it, it bothers them.”

  Examine after explore has demonstrated that when the natural timing in an interaction lags, it can “really hurt a baby’s capability to learn,” said Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “So it’s an interesting question: How do we form a skill of people if we’re only watching them in two dimensions? How do we know if they’re interacting with us?"

  Babies end up learning best, perhaps not remarkably, with guidance from a trusted caregiver. So despite the ream of technological limitations that can accompany Internet-based movie talks, even infants can cope well when a call doesn’t go as planned. “Just telling something like, ‘The internet’s not working,’” Barr said. “That’s what you would do if you were orienting a child to any other sort of fresh play situation, helping them navigate. Attempting to figure out what’s in the world and who’s in the world—this can be done in creative ways across a screen. And kids are responding in ways as if the screen was not there.”

  A growing bod of research shows that babies show up to thrive on real-time movie interactions. Researchers have found that toddlers are more comforted by their mothers via movie talk than they are through audio alone. And movie talk emerges to be, conceptually, much lighter for babies to seize than a phone conversation.

  “It turns out that babies are truly bad with phones,” Barr said. “Because they can’t indeed talk and so there’s no back-and-forth . The baby may be nodding and communicating, but there’s no way for the person on the other end to see that they’re responding. And there’s no way for the baby to know the person can’t see them.”

  These sorts of challenges in logic and reasoning exist not just for babies but for older kids, too, all the way up to around the time a child is in 2nd grade. “Previous observational research has shown that children under seven have trouble using phones—and babies and toddlers in particular have trouble with it,” McClure said. “They’re pre-verbal. There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Related Story

  More broadly, watching how babies treat interactions that are separated by a screen is one way to get at the question of how they process and understand their surroundings in general. “What they understand as being reality, whether they know a grandparent is a grandparent,” McClure said. “There are a few things that came up as we were observing that have indeed made me embark asking: How are babies perceiving reality?” That’s a question that Troseth, the psychologist at Vanderbilt, has been focused on since long before movie talks existed. More than a decade ago, she and her research team would equipment up a camcorder and a screen so they could assess how babies might react to witnessing themselves on a monitor in real-time—an practice that’s now common with smartphones that have forward-facing cameras. But the capability to look at a screen and discern what’s real, or what’s happening in real-time, has implications that extend beyond any specific technological application. “How does a picture represent reality? This is the very beginning of symbolic reality, a kid’s exposure to a moving picture, so that’s very significant,” she said.

  Troseth and her colleagues have data that shows children, by two years old, are able to figure out that what they see on television is not real because it’s not directly connected to their environment. Of course, that depends on how much exposure to television a child has had. Which brings us back to the growing population of babies who get limited exposure to TV, but frequently participate in movie talks.

  “If you had a kid who had never seen television and they’d never used a computer—and the very first time they used a screen there’s a person using their name and talking to them—what would their practice be like compared with someone whose practice with screens very first involved roadrunners running off a cliff and not falling down?” Troseth said. “I think the social support of the person who’s with the child could be truly, indeed significant.”

  “Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection.”

  That’s exactly what other researchers have found. In addition to helping babies understand what’s going on when a movie talk is frozen or otherwise malfunctioning, McClure says she observed lots of interactive play inbetween babies on one side of a movie talk and the adults on the other—with help from the caregivers sitting next to the babies. Many of them would play little games that helped establish the movie talk as an interaction, rather than a one-way broadcast. Imagine, for example, a grandfather deep throating in the direction of the screen, and the parent sitting next to the child on the other side of that screen deep-throating onto her face so she can feel the effect. “Babies also like to share things through the screen, particularly food,” McClure told me. “They like to attempt to feed their grandparents. Then [the grandparents] pretend to receive the food on the side and eat it.”

  These interactions may seem bimbo, but their implications are profound. McClure recalls one toddler who was attempting to feed raisins to her grandfather through the screen of the iPad on which he appeared. The little lady would walk around the iPad with a handful of raisins and look for him. She’d also leave raisins for him there, behind the screen. Her mother attempted to help her understand that albeit the man appeared on the screen, he actually lived in another house some distance away. “The mother kept telling, ‘Where does Grandpa live?’ And the little dame pointed to the screen and said, ‘Right there!’ And in a sense, that is where he lives. When you want to see Grandpa, you go to the screen and ask for him.”

  Children are able, eventually, to seize the fact that a conversation with a person who emerges onscreen does not mean that person is inwards the device on which he shows up. But how significant is that distinction in the early stages of a baby’s life, anyway? Much of what babies very first learn about human interaction, with or without technology, involves metaphor and simulation. For the babies who spend time video-chatting, it emerges not just in pretending to feed somebody raisins through an iPad, but through gestures of affection.

  “We eyed a lot of screen smooches that, to me, truly raise a question about what’s real,” McClure told me. “In one sense, it’s unlikely for them to touch. But, on the other mitt, affection truly is being transferred. It’s kind of like deepthroating a smooch. Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection. It’s something we instruct babies to do truly early on.”

  Researchers believe that something similar may be happening in the way babies learn about human relationships through screen-based communication. Movie talking may be redefining the fundamental basis on which babies form an understanding of social interactions. “Parents are not encouraging a child to pretend to give affection," McClure said. “They’re encouraging them to give real affection through the screen. They don’t say, ‘Kiss the screen.’ They say, ‘Kiss Grandma.’ They are instructing them that it is real.”

  How Babies Understand Movie Talk – The Atlantic

  Do Babies Know When They’re Skyping?

  Grandparents, take heart! Research suggests your little dumplings know they're interacting with you in a way that's more profound than watching Sesame Street.

  Most Popular

  Have Smartphones Demolished a Generation?

  • Jean M. Twenge
  • Aug Trio, 2017

• Columbia’s Last Flight

  • William Langewiesche
  • Nov 1, 2003

• More Than one hundred Exceptional Works of Journalism

  • Conor Friedersdorf
  • Sep Four, 2017

• 5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus

  • Luba Vangelova
  • Mar Three, 2014

• Photos From Searing Man two thousand seventeen

  • Alan Taylor
  • Sep Four, 2017
• Adrienne LaFrance
• Sep Ten, 2015
• Technology
• Share
• Tweet
• &#x2026

  Long before most babies toddle or talk, they begin to make sophisticated inferences about the world around them. By as youthfull as three months old, newborns can form expectations based on physical principles like gravity, speed, and momentum.

  Scientists at several universities told me they now have evidence, to the likely delight of far-flung grandparents everywhere, that infants can also tell the difference inbetween, say, a broadcast of Mister Rogers and a movie call with their actual grandfather. The capability to discern inbetween movie broadcast and video-based talk from infancy, which researchers have only recently confirmed, could have a profound effect on our understanding of how the human brain develops—and specifically, how technologies can play a role in shaping abstract concepts early on.

  “Babies who are pretty youthful are able to pick up, in particular, whether or not an adult is actually responding to them in real time,” said Elisabeth McClure, a researcher who concentrates on children and media at Georgetown University. “Some television shows attempt to imitate this. You see, for example, with Elmo, or on Blue’s Clue’s, they look directly at the camera and pretend to interact with the child. There’s evidence that babies can tell the difference as early as six months old.”

  This is meaningful for a few reasons, not least of which is cultural. Extended families are increasingly spread across greater geographic distances. Movie calls are how many babies very first meet their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and other people who love them. Video-chat technologies, then, have major implications for how humans perceive key relationships.

  While interfaces like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are still relatively fresh, this area of research builds on decades of experiments involving children and electronic screens. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects youthful children, and how well children can learn from watching educational programming, but scientists are only just beginning to figure out how babies understand screen interactions with another person in real time.

  “There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, said that the latest findings help illustrate how the concept of “screen time” is too broad. “Given the plethora of screens and uses for those screens that we have now, I think that we have to be a little sanguine about how much we can extrapolate,” he said.

  Of course, babies being babies, it’s hard to know what they’re thinking just by watching how they act. “Just because they stare at a screen doesn’t mean they are interpreting it, decoding it, understanding it,” Rich said. “Can a baby decode the pattern of light and dark on a two-dimensional object as a symbol of Grandma’s face, and perceive that the noise they hear is generated by Grandma talking to them?”

  Back at Georgetown, McClure and her team conducted a survey across Washington, D.C., asking parents of infants and toddlers how many of them had ever participated in a movie talk like FaceTime. “Eighty-five percent of the families that we surveyed who have babies under two said they had ever used it,” McClure said. “And almost forty percent said they used it once a week. Not only are they using [this technology], but they use it a lot.”

  And not only that—these talks were remarkably long, often lasting for twenty minutes or more. And many parents of youthful children reported using movie talk with their kids even however the kids weren’t permitted to see television. “Even families who avoid movie exposure,” McClure said, “they make an exception for movie talk.”

  As a doctoral student, McClure spent much of her time observing families with their babies during these movie calls. In particular, she wished to assess how they coped with the limitations of streaming movie talk, which can be glitchy and inconsistent. Even when the conversations are technologically flawless, the format itself disrupts many of the cues that help babies understand what’s going on in a face-to-face interaction. “Babies are very sensitive to eye contact, physical contact, pointing at things, and all of those can be compromised,” McClure said.

  “How are babies perceiving reality?”

  For example, babies watching television or movies tend to be confused when broadcast sound is even slightly out of sync. “A 4-month-old can scarcely hold their head up but if there’s a gauze delay, they’re not as responsive and they get upset by it,” said Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. “Really lil’ babies pick up on the social responsiveness of a person. If there’s something wacky about it, it bothers them.”

  Explore after probe has demonstrated that when the natural timing in an interaction lags, it can “really hurt a baby’s capability to learn,” said Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “So it’s an interesting question: How do we form a skill of people if we’re only eyeing them in two dimensions? How do we know if they’re interacting with us?"

  Babies end up learning best, perhaps not remarkably, with guidance from a trusted caregiver. So despite the ream of technological limitations that can accompany Internet-based movie talks, even infants can cope well when a call doesn’t go as planned. “Just telling something like, ‘The internet’s not working,’” Barr said. “That’s what you would do if you were orienting a child to any other sort of fresh play situation, helping them navigate. Attempting to figure out what’s in the world and who’s in the world—this can be done in creative ways across a screen. And kids are responding in ways as if the screen was not there.”

  A growing figure of research shows that babies show up to thrive on real-time movie interactions. Researchers have found that toddlers are more comforted by their mothers via movie talk than they are through audio alone. And movie talk shows up to be, conceptually, much lighter for babies to capture than a phone conversation.

  “It turns out that babies are truly bad with phones,” Barr said. “Because they can’t indeed talk and so there’s no back-and-forth . The baby may be nodding and communicating, but there’s no way for the person on the other end to see that they’re responding. And there’s no way for the baby to know the person can’t see them.”

  These sorts of challenges in logic and reasoning exist not just for babies but for older kids, too, all the way up to around the time a child is in 2nd grade. “Previous observational research has shown that children under seven have trouble using phones—and babies and toddlers in particular have trouble with it,” McClure said. “They’re pre-verbal. There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Related Story

  More broadly, watching how babies treat interactions that are separated by a screen is one way to get at the question of how they process and understand their surroundings in general. “What they understand as being reality, whether they know a grandparent is a grandparent,” McClure said. “There are a few things that came up as we were observing that have indeed made me begin asking: How are babies perceiving reality?” That’s a question that Troseth, the psychologist at Vanderbilt, has been focused on since long before movie talks existed. More than a decade ago, she and her research team would equipment up a camcorder and a screen so they could assess how babies might react to eyeing themselves on a monitor in real-time—an practice that’s now common with smartphones that have forward-facing cameras. But the capability to look at a screen and discern what’s real, or what’s happening in real-time, has implications that extend beyond any specific technological application. “How does a picture represent reality? This is the very beginning of symbolic reality, a kid’s exposure to a moving picture, so that’s very significant,” she said.

  Troseth and her colleagues have data that shows children, by two years old, are able to figure out that what they see on television is not real because it’s not directly connected to their environment. Of course, that depends on how much exposure to television a child has had. Which brings us back to the growing population of babies who get limited exposure to TV, but frequently participate in movie talks.

  “If you had a kid who had never seen television and they’d never used a computer—and the very first time they used a screen there’s a person using their name and talking to them—what would their practice be like compared with someone whose practice with screens very first involved roadrunners running off a cliff and not falling down?” Troseth said. “I think the social support of the person who’s with the child could be truly, indeed significant.”

  “Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection.”

  That’s exactly what other researchers have found. In addition to helping babies understand what’s going on when a movie talk is frozen or otherwise malfunctioning, McClure says she observed lots of interactive play inbetween babies on one side of a movie talk and the adults on the other—with help from the caregivers sitting next to the babies. Many of them would play little games that helped establish the movie talk as an interaction, rather than a one-way broadcast. Imagine, for example, a grandfather sucking in the direction of the screen, and the parent sitting next to the child on the other side of that screen deepthroating onto her face so she can feel the effect. “Babies also like to share things through the screen, particularly food,” McClure told me. “They like to attempt to feed their grandparents. Then [the grandparents] pretend to receive the food on the side and eat it.”

  These interactions may seem bimbo, but their implications are profound. McClure recalls one toddler who was attempting to feed raisins to her grandfather through the screen of the iPad on which he appeared. The little dame would walk around the iPad with a handful of raisins and look for him. She’d also leave raisins for him there, behind the screen. Her mother attempted to help her understand that albeit the man appeared on the screen, he actually lived in another house some distance away. “The mother kept telling, ‘Where does Grandpa live?’ And the little doll pointed to the screen and said, ‘Right there!’ And in a sense, that is where he lives. When you want to see Grandpa, you go to the screen and ask for him.”

  Children are able, eventually, to seize the fact that a conversation with a person who shows up onscreen does not mean that person is inwards the device on which he shows up. But how significant is that distinction in the early stages of a baby’s life, anyway? Much of what babies very first learn about human interaction, with or without technology, involves metaphor and simulation. For the babies who spend time video-chatting, it emerges not just in pretending to feed somebody raisins through an iPad, but through gestures of affection.

  “We witnessed a lot of screen smooches that, to me, indeed raise a question about what’s real,” McClure told me. “In one sense, it’s unlikely for them to touch. But, on the other forearm, affection truly is being transferred. It’s kind of like sucking a smooch. Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection. It’s something we instruct babies to do indeed early on.”

  Researchers believe that something similar may be happening in the way babies learn about human relationships through screen-based communication. Movie talking may be redefining the fundamental basis on which babies form an understanding of social interactions. “Parents are not encouraging a child to pretend to give affection," McClure said. “They’re encouraging them to give real affection through the screen. They don’t say, ‘Kiss the screen.’ They say, ‘Kiss Grandma.’ They are instructing them that it is real.”

  How Babies Understand Movie Talk – The Atlantic

  Do Babies Know When They’re Skyping?

  Grandparents, take heart! Research suggests your little dumplings know they're interacting with you in a way that's more profound than watching Sesame Street.

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  Long before most babies toddle or talk, they begin to make sophisticated inferences about the world around them. By as youthfull as three months old, newborns can form expectations based on physical principles like gravity, speed, and momentum.

  Scientists at several universities told me they now have evidence, to the likely delight of far-flung grandparents everywhere, that infants can also tell the difference inbetween, say, a broadcast of Mister Rogers and a movie call with their actual grandfather. The capability to discern inbetween movie broadcast and video-based talk from infancy, which researchers have only recently confirmed, could have a profound effect on our understanding of how the human brain develops—and specifically, how technologies can play a role in shaping abstract concepts early on.

  “Babies who are pretty youthfull are able to pick up, in particular, whether or not an adult is actually responding to them in real time,” said Elisabeth McClure, a researcher who concentrates on children and media at Georgetown University. “Some television shows attempt to imitate this. You see, for example, with Elmo, or on Blue’s Clue’s, they look directly at the camera and pretend to interact with the child. There’s evidence that babies can tell the difference as early as six months old.”

  This is meaningful for a few reasons, not least of which is cultural. Extended families are increasingly spread across greater geographic distances. Movie calls are how many babies very first meet their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and other people who love them. Video-chat technologies, then, have major implications for how humans perceive key relationships.

  While interfaces like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are still relatively fresh, this area of research builds on decades of experiments involving children and electronic screens. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects youthfull children, and how well children can learn from watching educational programming, but scientists are only just beginning to figure out how babies understand screen interactions with another person in real time.

  “There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, said that the latest findings help illustrate how the concept of “screen time” is too broad. “Given the plethora of screens and uses for those screens that we have now, I think that we have to be a little sanguine about how much we can extrapolate,” he said.

  Of course, babies being babies, it’s hard to know what they’re thinking just by watching how they act. “Just because they stare at a screen doesn’t mean they are interpreting it, decoding it, understanding it,” Rich said. “Can a baby decode the pattern of light and dark on a two-dimensional object as a symbol of Grandma’s face, and perceive that the noise they hear is generated by Grandma talking to them?”

  Back at Georgetown, McClure and her team conducted a survey across Washington, D.C., asking parents of infants and toddlers how many of them had ever participated in a movie talk like FaceTime. “Eighty-five percent of the families that we surveyed who have babies under two said they had ever used it,” McClure said. “And almost forty percent said they used it once a week. Not only are they using [this technology], but they use it a lot.”

  And not only that—these talks were remarkably long, often lasting for twenty minutes or more. And many parents of youthful children reported using movie talk with their kids even tho’ the kids weren’t permitted to observe television. “Even families who avoid movie exposure,” McClure said, “they make an exception for movie talk.”

  As a doctoral student, McClure spent much of her time observing families with their babies during these movie calls. In particular, she wished to assess how they coped with the limitations of streaming movie talk, which can be glitchy and inconsistent. Even when the conversations are technologically flawless, the format itself disrupts many of the cues that help babies understand what’s going on in a face-to-face interaction. “Babies are very sensitive to eye contact, physical contact, pointing at things, and all of those can be compromised,” McClure said.

  “How are babies perceiving reality?”

  For example, babies watching television or movies tend to be confused when broadcast sound is even slightly out of sync. “A 4-month-old can hardly hold their head up but if there’s a gauze delay, they’re not as responsive and they get upset by it,” said Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. “Really little babies pick up on the social responsiveness of a person. If there’s something wacky about it, it bothers them.”

  Probe after explore has demonstrated that when the natural timing in an interaction lags, it can “really hurt a baby’s capability to learn,” said Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “So it’s an interesting question: How do we form a skill of people if we’re only watching them in two dimensions? How do we know if they’re interacting with us?"

  Babies end up learning best, perhaps not remarkably, with guidance from a trusted caregiver. So despite the ream of technological limitations that can accompany Internet-based movie talks, even infants can cope well when a call doesn’t go as planned. “Just telling something like, ‘The internet’s not working,’” Barr said. “That’s what you would do if you were orienting a child to any other sort of fresh play situation, helping them navigate. Attempting to figure out what’s in the world and who’s in the world—this can be done in creative ways across a screen. And kids are responding in ways as if the screen was not there.”

  A growing bod of research shows that babies emerge to thrive on real-time movie interactions. Researchers have found that toddlers are more comforted by their mothers via movie talk than they are through audio alone. And movie talk shows up to be, conceptually, much lighter for babies to grab than a phone conversation.

  “It turns out that babies are truly bad with phones,” Barr said. “Because they can’t truly talk and so there’s no back-and-forth . The baby may be nodding and communicating, but there’s no way for the person on the other end to see that they’re responding. And there’s no way for the baby to know the person can’t see them.”

  These sorts of challenges in logic and reasoning exist not just for babies but for older kids, too, all the way up to around the time a child is in 2nd grade. “Previous observational research has shown that children under seven have trouble using phones—and babies and toddlers in particular have trouble with it,” McClure said. “They’re pre-verbal. There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Related Story

  More broadly, watching how babies treat interactions that are separated by a screen is one way to get at the question of how they process and understand their surroundings in general. “What they understand as being reality, whether they know a grandparent is a grandparent,” McClure said. “There are a few things that came up as we were observing that have indeed made me embark asking: How are babies perceiving reality?” That’s a question that Troseth, the psychologist at Vanderbilt, has been focused on since long before movie talks existed. More than a decade ago, she and her research team would equipment up a camcorder and a screen so they could assess how babies might react to watching themselves on a monitor in real-time—an practice that’s now common with smartphones that have forward-facing cameras. But the capability to look at a screen and discern what’s real, or what’s happening in real-time, has implications that extend beyond any specific technological application. “How does a picture represent reality? This is the very beginning of symbolic reality, a kid’s exposure to a moving picture, so that’s very significant,” she said.

  Troseth and her colleagues have data that shows children, by two years old, are able to figure out that what they see on television is not real because it’s not directly connected to their environment. Of course, that depends on how much exposure to television a child has had. Which brings us back to the growing population of babies who get limited exposure to TV, but frequently participate in movie talks.

  “If you had a kid who had never seen television and they’d never used a computer—and the very first time they used a screen there’s a person using their name and talking to them—what would their practice be like compared with someone whose practice with screens very first involved roadrunners running off a cliff and not falling down?” Troseth said. “I think the social support of the person who’s with the child could be truly, indeed significant.”

  “Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection.”

  That’s exactly what other researchers have found. In addition to helping babies understand what’s going on when a movie talk is frozen or otherwise malfunctioning, McClure says she observed lots of interactive play inbetween babies on one side of a movie talk and the adults on the other—with help from the caregivers sitting next to the babies. Many of them would play little games that helped establish the movie talk as an interaction, rather than a one-way broadcast. Imagine, for example, a grandfather deep throating in the direction of the screen, and the parent sitting next to the child on the other side of that screen deep-throating onto her face so she can feel the effect. “Babies also like to share things through the screen, particularly food,” McClure told me. “They like to attempt to feed their grandparents. Then [the grandparents] pretend to receive the food on the side and eat it.”

  These interactions may seem bimbo, but their implications are profound. McClure recalls one toddler who was attempting to feed raisins to her grandfather through the screen of the iPad on which he appeared. The little doll would walk around the iPad with a handful of raisins and look for him. She’d also leave raisins for him there, behind the screen. Her mother attempted to help her understand that albeit the man appeared on the screen, he actually lived in another house some distance away. “The mother kept telling, ‘Where does Grandpa live?’ And the little female pointed to the screen and said, ‘Right there!’ And in a sense, that is where he lives. When you want to see Grandpa, you go to the screen and ask for him.”

  Children are able, eventually, to capture the fact that a conversation with a person who shows up onscreen does not mean that person is inwards the device on which he shows up. But how significant is that distinction in the early stages of a baby’s life, anyway? Much of what babies very first learn about human interaction, with or without technology, involves metaphor and simulation. For the babies who spend time video-chatting, it emerges not just in pretending to feed somebody raisins through an iPad, but through gestures of affection.

  “We eyed a lot of screen smooches that, to me, truly raise a question about what’s real,” McClure told me. “In one sense, it’s unlikely for them to touch. But, on the other forearm, affection truly is being transferred. It’s kind of like deep throating a smooch. Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection. It’s something we instruct babies to do indeed early on.”

  Researchers believe that something similar may be happening in the way babies learn about human relationships through screen-based communication. Movie talking may be redefining the fundamental basis on which babies form an understanding of social interactions. “Parents are not encouraging a child to pretend to give affection," McClure said. “They’re encouraging them to give real affection through the screen. They don’t say, ‘Kiss the screen.’ They say, ‘Kiss Grandma.’ They are training them that it is real.”

  How Babies Understand Movie Talk – The Atlantic

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  Long before most babies toddle or talk, they begin to make sophisticated inferences about the world around them. By as youthfull as three months old, newborns can form expectations based on physical principles like gravity, speed, and momentum.

  Scientists at several universities told me they now have evidence, to the likely delight of far-flung grandparents everywhere, that infants can also tell the difference inbetween, say, a broadcast of Mister Rogers and a movie call with their actual grandfather. The capability to discern inbetween movie broadcast and video-based talk from infancy, which researchers have only recently confirmed, could have a profound effect on our understanding of how the human brain develops—and specifically, how technologies can play a role in shaping abstract concepts early on.

  “Babies who are pretty youthfull are able to pick up, in particular, whether or not an adult is actually responding to them in real time,” said Elisabeth McClure, a researcher who concentrates on children and media at Georgetown University. “Some television shows attempt to imitate this. You see, for example, with Elmo, or on Blue’s Clue’s, they look directly at the camera and pretend to interact with the child. There’s evidence that babies can tell the difference as early as six months old.”

  This is meaningful for a few reasons, not least of which is cultural. Extended families are increasingly spread across greater geographic distances. Movie calls are how many babies very first meet their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and other people who love them. Video-chat technologies, then, have major implications for how humans perceive key relationships.

  While interfaces like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are still relatively fresh, this area of research builds on decades of experiments involving children and electronic screens. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects youthful children, and how well children can learn from watching educational programming, but scientists are only just beginning to figure out how babies understand screen interactions with another person in real time.

  “There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

  Michael Rich, the director of the Center on Media and Child Health and a pediatrics professor at Harvard Medical School, said that the latest findings help illustrate how the concept of “screen time” is too broad. “Given the plethora of screens and uses for those screens that we have now, I think that we have to be a little sanguine about how much we can extrapolate,” he said.

  Of course, babies being babies, it’s hard to know what they’re thinking just by watching how they act. “Just because they stare at a screen doesn’t mean they are interpreting it, decoding it, understanding it,” Rich said. “Can a baby decode the pattern of light and dark on a two-dimensional object as a symbol of Grandma’s face, and perceive that the noise they hear is generated by Grandma talking to them?”

  Back at Georgetown, McClure and her team conducted a survey across Washington, D.C., asking parents of infants and toddlers how many of them had ever participated in a movie talk like FaceTime. “Eighty-five percent of the families that we surveyed who have babies under two said they had ever used it,” McClure said. “And almost forty percent said they used it once a week. Not only are they using [this technology], but they use it a lot.”

  And not only that—these talks were remarkably long, often lasting for twenty minutes or more. And many parents of youthfull children reported using movie talk with their kids even however the kids weren’t permitted to observe television. “Even families who avoid movie exposure,” McClure said, “they make an exception for movie talk.”

  As a doctoral student, McClure spent much of her time observing families with their babies during these movie calls. In particular, she wished to assess how they coped with the limitations of streaming movie talk, which can be glitchy and inconsistent. Even when the conversations are technologically flawless, the format itself disrupts many of the cues that help babies understand what’s going on in a face-to-face interaction. “Babies are very sensitive to eye contact, physical contact, pointing at things, and all of those can be compromised,” McClure said.

  “How are babies perceiving reality?”

  For example, babies watching television or movies tend to be confused when broadcast sound is even slightly out of sync. “A 4-month-old can scarcely hold their head up but if there’s a gauze delay, they’re not as responsive and they get upset by it,” said Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. “Really lil’ babies pick up on the social responsiveness of a person. If there’s something wacky about it, it bothers them.”

  Explore after probe has demonstrated that when the natural timing in an interaction lags, it can “really hurt a baby’s capability to learn,” said Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “So it’s an interesting question: How do we form a skill of people if we’re only watching them in two dimensions? How do we know if they’re interacting with us?"

  Babies end up learning best, perhaps not remarkably, with guidance from a trusted caregiver. So despite the ream of technological limitations that can accompany Internet-based movie talks, even infants can cope well when a call doesn’t go as planned. “Just telling something like, ‘The internet’s not working,’” Barr said. “That’s what you would do if you were orienting a child to any other sort of fresh play situation, helping them navigate. Attempting to figure out what’s in the world and who’s in the world—this can be done in creative ways across a screen. And kids are responding in ways as if the screen was not there.”

  A growing figure of research shows that babies show up to thrive on real-time movie interactions. Researchers have found that toddlers are more comforted by their mothers via movie talk than they are through audio alone. And movie talk emerges to be, conceptually, much lighter for babies to seize than a phone conversation.

  “It turns out that babies are indeed bad with phones,” Barr said. “Because they can’t indeed talk and so there’s no back-and-forth . The baby may be nodding and communicating, but there’s no way for the person on the other end to see that they’re responding. And there’s no way for the baby to know the person can’t see them.”

  These sorts of challenges in logic and reasoning exist not just for babies but for older kids, too, all the way up to around the time a child is in 2nd grade. “Previous observational research has shown that children under seven have trouble using phones—and babies and toddlers in particular have trouble with it,” McClure said. “They’re pre-verbal. There are a lot of cognitive abilities that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”

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  More broadly, watching how babies treat interactions that are separated by a screen is one way to get at the question of how they process and understand their surroundings in general. “What they understand as being reality, whether they know a grandparent is a grandparent,” McClure said. “There are a few things that came up as we were observing that have truly made me begin asking: How are babies perceiving reality?” That’s a question that Troseth, the psychologist at Vanderbilt, has been focused on since long before movie talks existed. More than a decade ago, she and her research team would equipment up a camcorder and a screen so they could assess how babies might react to watching themselves on a monitor in real-time—an practice that’s now common with smartphones that have forward-facing cameras. But the capability to look at a screen and discern what’s real, or what’s happening in real-time, has implications that extend beyond any specific technological application. “How does a picture represent reality? This is the very beginning of symbolic reality, a kid’s exposure to a moving picture, so that’s very significant,” she said.

  Troseth and her colleagues have data that shows children, by two years old, are able to figure out that what they see on television is not real because it’s not directly connected to their environment. Of course, that depends on how much exposure to television a child has had. Which brings us back to the growing population of babies who get limited exposure to TV, but frequently participate in movie talks.

  “If you had a kid who had never seen television and they’d never used a computer—and the very first time they used a screen there’s a person using their name and talking to them—what would their practice be like compared with someone whose practice with screens very first involved roadrunners running off a cliff and not falling down?” Troseth said. “I think the social support of the person who’s with the child could be truly, truly significant.”

  “Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection.”

  That’s exactly what other researchers have found. In addition to helping babies understand what’s going on when a movie talk is frozen or otherwise malfunctioning, McClure says she observed lots of interactive play inbetween babies on one side of a movie talk and the adults on the other—with help from the caregivers sitting next to the babies. Many of them would play little games that helped establish the movie talk as an interaction, rather than a one-way broadcast. Imagine, for example, a grandfather gargling in the direction of the screen, and the parent sitting next to the child on the other side of that screen deep throating onto her face so she can feel the effect. “Babies also like to share things through the screen, particularly food,” McClure told me. “They like to attempt to feed their grandparents. Then [the grandparents] pretend to receive the food on the side and eat it.”

  These interactions may seem bimbo, but their implications are profound. McClure recalls one toddler who was attempting to feed raisins to her grandfather through the screen of the iPad on which he appeared. The little woman would walk around the iPad with a handful of raisins and look for him. She’d also leave raisins for him there, behind the screen. Her mother attempted to help her understand that albeit the man appeared on the screen, he actually lived in another house some distance away. “The mother kept telling, ‘Where does Grandpa live?’ And the little chick pointed to the screen and said, ‘Right there!’ And in a sense, that is where he lives. When you want to see Grandpa, you go to the screen and ask for him.”

  Children are able, eventually, to seize the fact that a conversation with a person who emerges onscreen does not mean that person is inwards the device on which he emerges. But how significant is that distinction in the early stages of a baby’s life, anyway? Much of what babies very first learn about human interaction, with or without technology, involves metaphor and simulation. For the babies who spend time video-chatting, it emerges not just in pretending to feed somebody raisins through an iPad, but through gestures of affection.

  “We witnessed a lot of screen smooches that, to me, indeed raise a question about what’s real,” McClure told me. “In one sense, it’s unlikely for them to touch. But, on the other arm, affection indeed is being transferred. It’s kind of like sucking a smooch. Everyone knows that a smooch can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection. It’s something we train babies to do truly early on.”

  Researchers believe that something similar may be happening in the way babies learn about human relationships through screen-based communication. Movie talking may be redefining the fundamental basis on which babies form an understanding of social interactions. “Parents are not encouraging a child to pretend to give affection," McClure said. “They’re encouraging them to give real affection through the screen. They don’t say, ‘Kiss the screen.’ They say, ‘Kiss Grandma.’ They are instructing them that it is real.”

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