There are a lot of cognitive skills that go into understanding what a disembodied voice represents.”. “There are a few things that came up as we were observing that have really made me start asking: How are babies perceiving reality?” That’s a question that Troseth, the psychologist at Vanderbilt, has been focused on since long before video chats existed. This may not be directly due to the television itself, but more due to the fact that parents are not teaching while children are absorbed in the media box. “So it’s an interesting question: How do we form a knowledge of people if we’re only seeing them in two dimensions? 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. Not only are they using [this technology], but they use it a lot.”, And not only that—these chats were surprisingly long, often lasting for 20 minutes or more. Then [the grandparents] pretend to receive the food on the side and eat it.”, These interactions may seem silly, but their implications are profound. 12 months to 18 months By 18 months, your baby can understand 50 words and use around 20 of them (ICAN 2011, NHS 2013).Your baby will also use gestures with words and sounds to show you what he wants. “Eighty-five percent of the families that we surveyed who have babies under 2 said they had ever used it,” McClure said. “If you had a kid who had never seen television and they’d never used a computer—and the first time they used a screen there’s a person using their name and talking to them—what would their experience be like compared with someone whose experience with screens first involved roadrunners running off a cliff and not falling down?” Troseth said. Of course, that depends on how much exposure to television a child has had. Reserved. As with everything to do with kids, there isn’t a specific answer. They don’t say, ‘Kiss the screen.’ They say, ‘Kiss Grandma.’ They are teaching them that it is real.”. More broadly, watching how babies handle 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. By as young as 3 months old, newborns can form expectations based on physical principles like gravity, speed, and momentum. Long before most babies toddle or talk, they begin to make sophisticated inferences about the world around them. More than a decade ago, she and her research team would rig up a camcorder and a screen so they could assess how babies might react to seeing themselves on a monitor in real-time—an experience that’s now common with smartphones that have forward-facing cameras. But I suspect as soon as they are capable of actually paying attention to a TV show, and realizing it’s a story, they can be scared. It’s something we teach babies to do really early on.”, Researchers believe that something similar may be happening in the way babies learn about human relationships through screen-based communication. It’s kind of like blowing a kiss. They may also suffer developmental delays. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Your Privacy Controls. To enable Verizon Media and our partners to process your personal data select 'I agree', or select 'Manage settings' for more information and to manage your choices. 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. Much of what babies first learn about human interaction, with or without technology, involves metaphor and simulation. All Rights “A 4-month-old can barely hold their head up but if there’s a tape 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. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects young 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. “Babies also like to share things through the screen, particularly food,” McClure told me. A growing body of research shows that babies appear to thrive on real-time video interactions. In particular, she wanted to assess how they coped with the limitations of streaming video chat, which can be glitchy and inconsistent. “They like to try to feed their grandparents. Everyone knows that a kiss can’t fly through the air, but it’s a socially accepted form of affection. As a doctoral student, McClure spent much of her time observing families with their babies during these video calls. Video-chat technologies, then, have major implications for how humans perceive key relationships. 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. She’d also leave raisins for him there, behind the screen. And many parents of young children reported using video chat with their kids even though the kids weren’t allowed to watch television. Trying to figure out what’s in the world and who's in the world—this can be done in creative ways across a screen. In addition to helping babies understand what’s going on when a video chat is frozen or otherwise malfunctioning, McClure says she observed lots of interactive play between babies on one side of a video chat and the adults on the other—with help from the caregivers sitting next to the babies. Infants may stare at the bright colors and motion on a screen, but their brains are incapable of making sense or meaning out of all those bizarre pictures. The ability to discern between video broadcast and video-based chat 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. But the ability 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. Which brings us back to the growing population of babies who get limited exposure to TV, but frequently participate in video chats. So despite the ream of technological limitations that can accompany Internet-based video chats, even infants can cope well when a call doesn’t go as planned. How do we know if they’re interacting with us? 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. While interfaces like Skype, FaceTime, and Google Hangout are still relatively new, this area of research builds on decades of experiments involving children and electronic screens. “They’re encouraging them to give real affection through the screen. Grandparents, take heart! This is the very beginning of symbolic reality, a kid's exposure to a moving picture, so that’s very important,” she said. Children are able, eventually, to grasp the fact that a conversation with a person who appears onscreen does not mean that person is inside the device on which he appears. “Even families who avoid video exposure,” McClure said, “they make an exception for video chat.”. “Parents are not encouraging a child to pretend to give affection," McClure said. For example, babies watching television or movies tend to be confused when broadcast sound is even slightly out of sync. “The mother kept saying, ‘Where does Grandpa live?’ And the little girl pointed to the screen and said, ‘Right there!’ And in a sense, that is where he lives. “In one sense, it’s impossible for them to touch. Of course, babies being babies, it’s hard to know what they’re thinking just by watching how they act. The little girl would walk around the iPad with a handful of raisins and look for him. “They're pre-verbal. Physical and social interaction allows babies to pick up subtle cues that also help language development. It takes around 18 months for a baby's brain to develop to the point where the symbols on a screen come to represent their equivalents in the real world. “It turns out that babies are really bad with phones,” Barr said. Her mother tried to help her understand that although the man appeared on the screen, he actually lived in another house some distance away. “Just because they stare at a screen doesn’t mean they are interpreting it, decoding it, understanding it,” Rich said. Troseth and her colleagues have data that shows children, by 2 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. But, on the other hand, affection really is being transferred. This is meaningful for a few reasons, not least of which is cultural. “Really tiny babies pick up on the social responsiveness of a person. When you want to see Grandpa, you go to the screen and ask for him.”. Video calls are how many babies first meet their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and other people who love them. “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. “Previous observational research has shown that children under 7 have trouble using phones—and babies and toddlers in particular have trouble with it,” McClure said. TheAtlantic.com Copyright (c) 2020 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. Find out more about how we use your information in our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy. We and our partners will store and/or access information on your device through the use of cookies and similar technologies, to display personalised ads and content, for ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. But how important is that distinction in the early stages of a baby’s life, anyway? “That’s what you would do if you were orienting a child to any other sort of new play situation, helping them navigate. Researchers have long studied how passive television viewing affects young children, and how well children can learn from watching educational … “We saw a lot of screen kisses that, to me, really raise a question about what’s real,” McClure told me. There's evidence that babies can tell the difference as early as 6 months old.”. Video chatting may be redefining the fundamental basis on which babies form an understanding of social interactions. We want to hear what you think about this article. Parents can better spend the time their baby is awake by speaking "baby talk" (which actually helps babies develop language) and engaging in interactive activities that TV can't provide. “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 video chat like FaceTime. And he'll be able to follow more simple instructions, such as, "pick up those building blocks" or, "find mummy's shoes" (ICAN 2011, Sheridan 2008).