Here's today's feel-good story:
Babies and young children must learn who they can count on in order to navigate social relationships.
Researchers at MIT have discovered a specific signal that babies and young children use to identify if two people have a strong relationship with a mutual obligation to help one another: kissing and sharing food.
The study shows that babies expect those that share saliva to come to each other's aid when needed, more so than when people share toys or use other types of interactions.
“Babies don’t know in advance which relationships are the close and morally obligating ones, so they have to have some way of learning this by looking at what happens around them,” says Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.