"When playing an online game that placed an adult on the side of a road after running out of gas, both parents and nonparents were quicker to detect oncoming traffic, and rated cars as moving faster, when they had to keep a virtual baby out of harm's way. Reactions were quicker when looking after a crawling infant than a dog or a toy robot."
""It's not a question of multitasking that caused these adults to perceive the cars as moving faster or to see them as more dangerous - it was having the baby there," said Michael Goldstein, professor in the Department of Psychology and the College of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Behavioral Analysis of Beginning Years (B.A.B.Y.) Laboratory. "It's not so much that parents hold the baby closer, but that they perceive the world as more threatening, in a way that causes them to reinterpret what they're seeing.""
Virtual-environment experiments placed adults at the roadside and required them to protect a virtual baby, a dog, or a toy robot. Adults, whether parents or nonparents, detected oncoming traffic faster and judged cars as moving faster when they had to keep a virtual baby safe. Reactions were strongest when the virtual infant was crawling. Infants' appearance and movements altered adults' interpretation of sensory information, promoting heightened threat perception and behaviors that support infant safety and learning. This automatic caregiving response likely evolved because human infants develop mobility before they develop full cognitive safety skills.
Read at Cornell Chronicle
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