GRIT Talks: How Can We Know What Babies Know?

Babies may look like adorable blobs—unable to talk, explain thoughts, or tell us what they know. Yet developmental scientists have developed powerful methods to uncover the infant mind. In this talk, I introduce how researchers study babies and what these methods reveal about early social learning. I focus on emotions, beginning with the dominant view that emotions are defined by valence (positivity–negativity) and arousal. I then present evidence from infant research for a different account: emotional expressions function as information that guides behavior and helps people avoid harm. Drawing on work from my lab, I show that even young infants use others’ emotional reactions to guide their behavior, suggesting babies can learn about the world by closely attending to others’ emotions.

About the Speaker: Zoe Liberman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her work investigates the origins and development of humans’ social understanding. She is particularly interested in how infants begin to think about our complicated social world, as well as how their social knowledge changes across development based on experience. She runs an on-campus lab focused on infant cognition and partners with the Santa Barbara Zoo and MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation to study social cognition with school-aged children. Her work has been supported by a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, and by the Templeton Foundation.