Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Dr. Andrew Meltzoff and Dr. Rodolfo Cortes Barragan for the "Stories of Impact" series.

Watch the video version of this conversation.

RS =  Richard Sergay (interviewer)
AM = Andrew Meltzoff (interviewee)
RCB = Rodolfo Cortes Barraga (interviewee)

Andrew Meltzoff, Co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. 

RS: Tell me about the genesis of this project.

AM: I've been doing research on young infants for quite some time and I'm fascinated by their awareness about other people and their social cognition, their understanding of other people, how that originates and how it develops. 

RS: Altruism in toddlers?

AM: Well, the current project focuses on altruism but actually has a long history. We study children starting at birth and then their development over the first three years of life. And I've been particularly fascinated about social interaction, how young babies, even newborn babies react to other people. We're a very, very hyper social species and it culminates when the children are about 18 months of age 15, 18 months of age in acting in an altruistic way to others. But even prior to that, even in the newborn period, babies are born social, they're born paying special attention to other people and that gives rise to their sense of empathy and altruism in treating others and pro-social ways. 

RS: Define diverse intelligence.

AM: The idea of diverse intelligence is that many people think of human beings as just cognitive beings, as say perhaps just chess playing, problem solving, species. And when we build computers to compete with human beings, like human beings and show that they can match human beings. We often have them in chess matches. Well that's just a particular type of adult cognition. In fact there is another whole domain called social cognition and being aware of other people and our understanding of how to interact with others, interact in groups, take care of others, feel emotionally when other people are in pain, feel what they feel, stand inside their shoes and so forth. And even that is an aspect of diverse intelligence, it's not the chess playing, problem solving, adult person that we're only interested in. It's our social being, our moral reactions, our understanding of right and wrong in the world. Our tendency, say, to stand up and fight for a promise that we've made or a constitution that's on a piece of paper or an ideal that is human species as well. And that's a diverse part, a different part of our intelligence than our simple problem solving, chess playing, self. So I think one of the things that Templeton's particularly interested in is intelligence in all of its forms, not just the chess playing form but the social intelligence as well. And then other aspects -- of what you might call intelligence -- that don't apply only to adults. And for instance in my case I'm interested in non-linguistic intelligence, intelligence that doesn't depend on language at all. Maybe that undergirds language or underlies language that language grows out of. So again when we think of adult intelligence its language linguistic interaction, chess playing, those sorts of things. I'm very interested in pre linguistic intelligence, what makes humans human, what makes humans social, that does not depend upon language. And there's an awful lot, there is the language of emotion, the language of gesture, the social interaction my nodding at you and nodding back, all sorts of things that make us distinctively human and one could call a form of emotional intelligence or social intelligence and that surely starts in the young baby before they have language, when language emerges at 15 or 18 months of age. All mothers, all fathers, think that their infant is intelligent. But the 12 month old isn't playing chess and the 12 month old isn't speaking language. So why do we think that human 12 month old is intelligent, indeed the six month old is intelligent and even younger. What is it in the human brain? What is it in the social interaction that allows us to attribute, I think rightly, the idea that there is an intelligent being?

RS: Why focus on altruism in toddlers?

AM: I think altruism is a very important characteristic of human beings. I think it has to do with helping others, attending to others, doing good for others when it comes at some cost to the self. If it is of no cost to the self you might not call it altruism, it might be some sort of helping or assisting others or cooperating with others. I think altruism comes into play when there's a little form of sacrifice or, or cost to the self, and despite that one helps or assists the other to do them some good. And I think human beings of course do that all the time. We, we help others to sacrifice ourselves. I mean people jump into the ocean to save drowning people and sometimes that's at a cost to themselves. We, something that we hold dear as our, our money and we give money away to other people even though at a more selfish level of course it might be better to keep the money. Many of us have no problem giving to causes that we believe in and people that we believe in. And so that, that pro-social behavior, that pro-social attitude that human beings have, of course is very important to society and civilization. And it sort of greases the skids for civilization to know that others, at least others in your in-group, others in your crowd, in your tribe, in your civilization, will come to your aid when you need it and reciprocally you come to their aid. And you don't only do that because of the sort of rules or laws. That's another important point. You do because somehow you feel it in your gut that helping others, even if it comes at a cost to you, is-- there's something good about that. And indeed remarkably I think human beings also feel good, feel rewarded themselves for having done that. So it's as if we're built to be a very social, caring, and perhaps altruistic species where we want to take care of others like us. 

RS: Is altruism intrinsic to human beings?

AM: Is altruism intrinsic, is it biological? Big question. I mean, that in part is what our Templeton project is indeed about, to find out what components of this might be biological built-in and what might emerge from very early social interaction with others and that's very, very difficult to tease apart. One thing we know for sure and one thing that's very important is that very young children, probably without the help of language, 15, 18, 20 month old babies will act in altruistic ways to others. And so from the, from most people's point of view it's a very, very early emerging aspect of human behavior and behavior even of our little babies. You don't learn altruism in school, they don't have a first grade class with the person writing on the blackboard. Now be sure you're altruistic to others. Let me define altruism. This is something that emerges in babies in the second half year of life. It flowers. And it's very, very dramatic when little babies act that way. So many parents and many scientists are wondering, have the fundamental question, where does this come from. Where does this behavior in babies arise from? 

RS: Your theory is?

AM: Well, my theory is actually that we're not born out altruistic in the sense that a one hour old baby would act in an altruistic way to the mother or doctor. We're probably not doing altruistic acts at one month, two months, and three months of age, but we are biologically prepared to interact in a social way about others and to detect the connection between self and other. And that fundamental connection of recognizing that people out there are like me, that they're like the self and I am like them, that I do believe is present at birth and that idea that other people are like me, coupled with social interaction with your mother and your father and your caretakers who are taking care of you, I think gives rise to our altruistic behavior. So it's deeply biological. We're a social species. It arises very, very early. It is not taught explicitly. It arises in the child from implicit understanding of others and their social interactions with others. That doesn't mean that the 1 week old will act in an altruistic way. So I think it's a basic aspect of human intelligence and human interaction that arises extraordinarily early. I actually think it's built on prior social interactions and a certain point that develops into a form of altruism that we might recognize as such, that we help others at some sacrifice to the self. 

RS: Evolutionary -- has altruism been designed into a human?

AM: Well, I mean, has language been designed into human beings. Yes in the sense that we have the tools to acquire language yet a one week old baby does not have language and so we shouldn't expect everything that has biological roots to show up at birth. We shouldn't expect that everything with biological roots has to be explicitly taught. So there's-- it's complicated scientific answer to the question about has it been designed in, either altruism or the roots of altruism, are designed into human beings. I tend to think that it's the roots of altruism that coupled with social interaction of a human caretaker, of a human group that takes care of you that you bond with and recognizes like me, I tend to think that those basic foundations give rise to altruism but those basic foundations are present, some of those foundations are present at birth. So it's as if you take the biological skeletal foundations, add social interaction, and what flowers from that is alt-- is altruism. Sorry, I better say that again. It's as if you take the biological roots of recognizing others like me, add social interaction, and what flowers from that is altruism. It's a dynamic interplay between what's biologically present and the social environment that the child is reared in. But these tendencies like to act in an altruistic, helping way with others, arise extraordinarily early. That I think is important. It is not as though the mother, the father, the caretaker, has to give the child a lesson in altruism. Not-- not even in the school sense of a lesson on a whiteboard. But even in the sense of that a parent might say don't put your finger in an electric socket. You do have to teach your child explicitly that. The child doesn't know what an electric socket is, they might walk over and put their finger in it. So you do in a sense explicitly teach them don't do that. You explicitly teach them not to do dangerous things. You explicitly teach them certain things about how to greet somebody, how to shake their hand when they're say two and a half or three years of age, you might want to show your two and a half or three year old how to gre-- greet a stranger and you'd say in our culture you say, shake a hand. In another culture you might say you should bow. In another culture you might say you should rub noses and there's some explicit teaching about that. In fact with altruism, I think altruism arises without such explicit teaching. It arises through natural social interaction that this biological being at birth recognizes those people out there as being like me, I identify with them. They're connected to me. They're like me, they act like me, they feel like me. They have beliefs and desires like me. And those feelings about others coupled with social interaction gives rise to the altruism that we see in the 18 month old and the 2 year old.

RS: Being biologically present, does that mean every toddler has altruism built in?

AM: Well, there are individual differences I think in altruism as there are in other aspects of human development. And so it doesn't mean that everybody is precisely the same. You can have something that has biological roots without all of us I think being identical about them. So we might have biological roots for curiosity, to under-- to want to solve problems, to want to help others, to want to make sense of things in the world. But some people perhaps have a little more sense of that curiosity or curiosity in particular domains and others are curious about other domains. So there's this sort of combination of universality, the possibility for our altruism is present I think in all of us, and perhaps there's some individual differences about how we act. Another possibility is not that there are individual differences in altruism, in all forms of altruism, but that some of us act altruistically in certain circumstances or over certain events and other people act altruistically about other events. You might feel strongly and help your fellow being...

(INTERRUPTION - DOOR)

AM: If there are biological roots, if there are biological roots for altruism, if there are biological roots for altruism doesn't mean that everybody is identical. I don't think so, I think saying that there's biological roots still allows for there to be individual differences, individual tendencies to help people in some circumstances and not other circumstances and so forth. So saying there's biological roots and some universal capacity for altruism, that human beings can become altruistic, whereas some other species perhaps may not, that may be universal, the capacity. But the way it's expressed, maybe even the age at which it's expressed, and over what events it's expressed, those may differ between individuals. I mean one of the characteristics of human beings also that's important that relates back to diverse intelligence is that we're all different from one another as well.  We, you know, some are artists, some are scientists, some sing, some draw, if you're an artist. Some scientists or physicists and engineers. And some scientists are neuroscientists or psychologists and the skill set and interests of the engineer working with things and loads and physics, is actually quite different from the mindset and skill set of a psychologist who wants to know what makes people tick and where do pro-social emotions and pro-social interactions arise from. So those engineers and psychologists are not the same but you could lump them together and say they're both scientists. So one characteristic of human beings is that unlike crickets we might be very different from one another, we might have very different interests and passions and things we do in life. So I think the diversity of human beings and individual differences is still compatible with some sort of biological roots of what's the essence of mankind. As a matter of fact you might think that one of the essences of what it means to be human is the ability to be different from the person next to us. Some things are universal but some are based on our own life history, our own interests, our own experiences, and what we've interacted with and what, how we've interpreted them, how we've made sense of them. That flexibility, that cognitive and social emotional flexibility, is fundamentally what it means to be human. We are not cookie cutters of one another in that sense. We have great diversity.

RS: In your studies, are you finding any of these subjects lacking in altruism altogether?

AM: Well, I'm not sure our infant test-- I take the easy way out, I'm not sure our infant tests which happened at one time with a child or allow us to say whether a child is lacking in altruism altogether. That would be a very rapid conclusion to draw from our one hour with the, with the child. You know if we wanted to say that, for instance if we wanted to develop a screening device for early psychopaths, or children or humans that would grow up without any sense of caring, empathy, compassion, for other people, we might have to do a more extensive battery than the type of battery that we're doing with 18 and 19 month olds now with a single task. So to be fair, to develop you know batteries that sort and categorize people, that takes sort of multi-day tests and more extensive batteries and to tell you the truth I'd be a bit hesitant about drawing those conclusions from tests with 19 month old babies. I mean the magic of working with babies is you get to look at roots and origins and you can be the first person in the world who has seen that baby interact in that situation in that way. I mean sometimes the mothers are even surprised by what they see in our tests of altruism. So that's the magic of being a developmental psychologist, you get to see what this baby can do when they're at their best, what's their capacity. The flip side of the question is, is there a child with no sense of altruism, compassion, empathy, with others. And before one draws that conclusion one would need to do a much larger battery of tests and that's not exactly what we're trying to develop.

RS: Do you distinguish between altruism and empathy?

AM: Well, I think there might be a slight, both empathy and altruistic are pro-social behaviors, they're a positive attitude that we have toward other people. I think one could feel empathy toward another without necessarily taking action to help the other. So you could observe somebody, stand in their shoes and feel a great sense of empathy for them without acting to right that wrong or to help them. I do think a sense of altruism or showing that you're acting altruistically, takes some action to correct or make it better for the other person. And so I think the two concepts are probably closely connected. But there are some distinctions to draw. We happen to be quite interested in altruism, we happen to want to see these little 19 month olds toddle over to a stranger that they have no familial sort of commitment to and help that other person. That sense of altruism which we might be able to observe in young kids is you know sort of tugs at your heart and is something you want to, want to explore rather than say do a psycho-physiological test of a 19 month old sitting in a high chair, seeing somebody injured and seeing if a part of their brain lights up or they respond psycho- physiologically, to illustrate that they feel a sense of empathy to another but they don't do anything about it. That might be a very interesting test of  empathy. We're interested in is do these little babies try to help somebody, another human being? And you know they're small and weak and they can't do much. And so this idea that they try to help somebody is, is you know, really very endearing. 

RS:  Why this cohort, 18, 19  month olds?

AM:  Right. So we're focusing on 18, 19 month old babies because they don't have much anxiety about strangers. You know if you test them too young even if they felt a sense of empathy they might not express something that's inside of them because they are fearful or anxious of strangers. And we wanted them to have the particular motor skills they need to be able to toddle over, pick up small objects, hand it to others and so forth. I think one could reasonably test children between 15 and 20 months of age and get similar sorts of results. We've happened to pick this age to work with because we're developing a new task and we want to test young children, solidly infants, and we feel like this age is an age where they have the motor skills to express what's on their mind and in their hearts. 

RS: Surprises you've found so far?

AM: Well, I think it is surprising, we're doing a study where an adult picks up a piece of food that the child likes like a grape and makes it clear that that's the, this stranger, this experimenter is grape and then the grape-- the, the stranger accidentally, it slips out of his hand and falls onto a tray below on the floor and the toddler sort of looks wide eyed at that and then what we're finding is they toddle over pick up this desirable, highly desirable piece of food, have it in their hand and then looks at the stranger and gives it back, gives it to the adult who's reaching out his hand stretching out his hand and clearly wants this. And we're taking that kind of thing as acting altruistically because the food, giving away food is like to a child that's something of value, just like giving away money. And in adults it's something that you own, you have, if you drop a dollar bill does the person on the street just take it and run. Which some other species might do if it were something of value to them. Do they take this valuable object and run away? Or do they take this valuable object and give it back to you because you're showing that you want it. So we were very, very interested in having young babies have something desirable like a favorite piece of food right in their hands. They, it's called sort of hot cognition not cold cognition, not something that doesn't matter to them. But having a piece of food touching their skin in their hand they could do anything with it. They could turn away, go to their mother, pop the grape in their mouth and that sort of thing. And we're finding that they don't, they give it back to the adult.  And that is, was surprising to us because people hadn't before been asking the child to give back something that was of value to the child, something that's of biological value, something that the species for survival needs to do which is eat food, increase your calories. These are child centered foods that the adult is using and yet the child gives it back. So, that watershed of would the child share, give back, help the adult, when helping the adult meant giving up something of biological survival value for the self. That was an interesting test to young babies. And I must say we were, you know, surprised to see how the children responded. And sometimes you can't help but smile when you see a little human being toddle over and, and help another human being even though they don't know that person, even though they haven't you know spent days interacting with that person. That's a pretty fundamental aspect of what it means to be human that you're seeing these little kids express.

RS: What does that tell you?

AM: That tells us that human beings are fundamentally a social species and built to be in social groups where we will mutually help one another. Again, prior to language, prior to laws, prior to government institutions, prior to the threat of punishment, prior to the idea that you'll be locked in jail if you steal things, prior to all that, human beings are built to interact in altruistic, helping pro-social way to others they see. Now we're very interested in studying the limits of that. Are there people you wouldn't help. Do you help people who are like you, more people who are in your tribe, people are part of your group, more than you help people in the out groups. Could your parents override some natural tendency to altruism, if you're brought up in a, in a family that says to shun or teaches to shun people who look a certain way or act a certain way, would that override some sort of natural sense of altruism. There are many, many, many fascinating questions to ask once you find out the fundamental kernel do our little babies help others in altruistic ways to begin with. Once you find that then you can begin to manipulate and study other things which we intend to do. These are all fascinating questions about sort of human civilization and how we survive and thrive in interacting in social groups. And that's the magic of being a developmental psychologist, right. You can, philosophers, religious leaders, others who have asked for millennia where does this come from, when can you find the first manifestations of it, does it grow from, does altruism or social interaction grow from language, does it grow from laws, from specific teaching and so forth. Developmental psychologists have the privilege of sitting nose to nose with little babies and posing these sorts of questions to them and trying to devise clever experiments to get them to cooperate and show you what's on their mind and in their hearts. That's the excitement about being a developmental psychologist. But it doesn't answer all questions, it doesn't answer if children are like that at 18, 19 months of age. Why do some children not like, act like that later? It doesn't answer the question of why we might grow up and dehumanize other groups who are not like us. Why do we separate into tribes and divide the world into us and them? What I think it does show is prior to dividing the world into us and them and shunning others and treating them as non-humans. Prior to that the children feel a much more global sense of others are like me, a sense of we-ness, a sense of us, before there's division into us and them and dehumanizing them. And that's a big question of course that religious leaders and thinkers of, of government and civilization and how to design social groups have thought for a long time, are we born and do we fundamentally start off with you know sort of me against the world or me and my mother, my team is me and my mother against everybody else, and you have to be taught to love others, taught to see others as like you, taught to feel positively to others. Or conversely do we in the beginning first see others as being like me and similar to me and having similar actions, thoughts, and feelings like me, and then through training or experience begin to divide the world into us and them. And I'm of the latter camp. As it turns out I believe the research shows that babies from the beginning think of others as being like me. They see the similarities between self and others and that's the sort of fundamental state from which we begin.  

RS:  Is there an innate sense that is built in? Cooperation?

AM: Acting in a pro-social way with others, including probably cooperating with others, is pretty fundamental in human beings. I mean the thing is that children first begin to do what you might call cooperation by acting in a parallel way or coordinated way with others so the co-operative behavior is really quite, is sort of quite simple and elementary to begin with. They might cooperate, bring two things to the table to solve a problem they might, each person play their own role in solving a problem, getting, removing an object or sharing an object from a box or something like that. So the cooperation that children show to begin with is quite primitive but it develops very early. 

RS: This includes no reward. What does that mean?

AM: What it means is at least on the first instance in the first trial the child, the adult has a grape in their hand. You know and the grape has grape juice on it and it looks delicious and the adult accidentally drops it on the tray and the pick-- child picks up in their hand at the moment that the child has the grape in their hand they have to decide what to do with it. And they have not been rewarded by that stranger ever in the past for giving something, giving something back to them or acting in this sort of way. So the child has a mini decision to make at that moment when they get the grape or blueberry in their hand. They can turn away and toddle away to their mother. They can pop it in their mouth in which case it disappears and they have it and the adult don't, doesn't. Or they can choose to take this grape and give it to another person. So the child gives that object away without any reward to the self. But does it because they want to give it back to the rightful owner, want to give the grape to the person who desires it, wants to give the grape to the, the person who's showing they need it and want it and started out with it and the child can actually pick it up and from the, the tray and instead of saying this is for me, thinks this is for you, and share it with the other.

RS: Pre-verbal children-- what is the connection they're making with the person conducting the experiment?

AM: Yes, sort of why, or what motivates the children to do this. So a sense of wanting to help others and feeling altruistic is a global answer so we think that these young toddlers feel that. But if you could ask where that comes from or what it's root, what that itself might be rooted in. I think that the children have the experiences themselves. This is speculation. But I think the children have experiences themselves of, for instance, trying, struggling to try to pull apart an object and wanting to pull, to remove something one object from another or pull apart an object that's stuck and they struggle at doing that. And when they see somebody else struggle in the same way they can recognize the similarity between me and you. Between what you are doing and what I'm doing, they can understand the identity or similarity. In parallel to that, the children have previously dropped things, things have fallen out of their hands by mistake and they have fallen out of reach as they do in our experiment here. And I think when they have that experience they can relate it to the experience they see you having when you have a grape in your hand and it falls, falls from your hand accidentally and is now out of reach to you. So I think part of the child's motivation is they can recognize the similarity between self and other and they know when they act on, in this way. They want help from others. They want others to rectify the situation and give the object back to them that has fallen out of their hands and they can relate their own behavior, their own past experience, their own sense of self and their desires, to what they see your desires being, which is you want this object that's fallen from your hands. So I think that's why I say that altruism I believe develops on even a prior connection between self and others, the recognition that you are like me, that I can identify with you, that there's some similarity between self and other. If there was no similarity at all, if we were separate monads and I was not connected to you in any way at all, I am not sure that we have a robotic drive to act altruistically to something else with two eyes, a nose and a mouth. You see what I mean, that we have a drive to act that way to a separate monad that I couldn't relate to in any way at all. But I think the fact that the baby feels a connection to another person, recognizes another is like me, recognizes that person's arm movements is like my arm movements, recognize that person's outstretched hand trying to reach for an object as being like my own outstretched hand when I am trying to reach for an object. By my own experience I can understand the actions and desires and emotions of other people and that's I think part of what gives rise to our wanting to help and act altruistically to other people. This fundamental identity between self and other I think is enormously important. 

RS: No language is spoken.

AM: These, in our experiment and in other experiments, it's not required, language doesn't really enter into it. The adult never is saying please help me, please give me back the grape. Can you pick it up, that sort of language is completely ruled out from our experiment. Of course you could do an experiment where you are doing with the linguistic support and we wanted to do a study that did not require linguistic support. So we do not explicitly through language ask for help. We do not say give it to me for instance. (SO...) So they have to understand the gesture as being, give it to me. The gesture has to indicate, could you help me, I need that. 

RS: Babies recognizing facial expression.

AM:For sure, babies recognize facial expression and that's another component that goes into altruism in the build-up, they have to understand your body language which includes your facial expressions and outstretched arms as meaning you desire something, you desire the thing that's out of reach. They need to be able to read that and give meaning to that and interpret that. And of course I think they do. I mean it's really quite interesting to think of the little baby behind the high chair understanding so much about our non-linguistic gestures, body postures, attitudes and actions and their meaning. There the child is in the high chair and mom and dad are in the kitchen and mom and dad are interacting and mom is putting out her hand and extending her hand asking for something. Dad gives it to Mom, Mom gives it to Dad, they're, I think they can understand those facial expressions and bodily actions far before language so it's an interpretable, social world for them. They're not sort of a blank slate as the theory goes. They're not born a blank slate, born not understanding anything about the body movements they make. They can understand those body movements and facial expressions far before they have language and importantly far before they've learned, and had explicit lessons teaching them about that. They're like little sponges learning from us all the time and they're learning social lessons from watching us. And so the way we act in the kitchen, the way we act in the living room, the way we interact with each other in front of the high chair while the baby's watching, the child is processing that. The child picking up, this is how we act in this culture toward each other. We act in positive ways or negative ways, positive emotions, negative emotions. They're picking up those patterns of behavior simply from watching us and it changes them. 

RS: Gender or culturally specific in this study?

AM: Well, we have not done studies of altruism that are cross-cultural; those would be quite interesting to do. Of course we're using fundamental objects like fruit that we drop that are available in all cultures and we use those because they're the sort of food that children like in all cultures. So we're set up to do cross cultural studies but we haven't done cross cultural studies ourselves. Again, developmental psychologists, it's useful to do cross-cultural studies but also if you set up fundamental studies that tap abilities and objects that are around in most cultures then you can get at things that might be universal across the globe even though you have the limitation of studying in a laboratory in Seattle. We have to be aware of cultural differences and sort out cultural differences and cultural universal aspects of human beings. But if we design our studies cleverly enough in the lab we can be tapping things that may exist around the globe. It still has to be tested but that may exist around the globe. 

RS: Gender?

AM: Gender, it's a very interesting thing. We balance for gender in this study so I can't tell you the results of that. I don't think we're finding gender differences at this young age but that's something we're set up to test because we test very rigorously. Half the subjects we test are boys and half are girls. I think that's an important thing. 

RS: Any differences?

AM: I don't think we're finding any measurable differences at the moment in altruism between boys and girls at this age. That does not mean that differences in certain domains of helping and compassion and altruism wouldn't show up as sex differences later, it may be that you learn those sex differences. It may be that, and this is not an experiment we're doing about comforting others who cry for instance, by hugging them and comforting them and acting in a nurturing way, we're not doing that, you could do that experiment. It may be that boys and girls start off reacting to that in a quite similar way but by the time they're five or eight years old it may be that boys in our culture think crying is not something boys do. Nurturing and hugging others and patting on the back. Of course males and boys can do that but it might be thought of stereotypically as not primarily the male role, primarily females might do that. So that would be an instance of human beings might start off one way and culture might bend them or shape them or sculpt them into a different way of behaving. A mistake that's sometimes made by policymakers, governments, philosophers, is thinking that because you see certain differences in how 8 year olds or 10 year olds act, that those differences are biologically rooted. That they're necessarily there to begin. And of course they might not be there to begin with, it might be that the little babies act similarly to one another and culture shapes our children in a culturally specific way for males and Western culture to act one way and females another way. That is not to undermine the idea that there can be biological intrinsic differences between the sexes as well. There can be but all of that are empirical questions rather than assumptions that we ought to make that you know that females are more altruistic or more nurturing than males are. Maybe they start out that way, maybe they become that way through cultural influence. And that's why we need developmental psychology to study those things rather than to make assumptions. One thing we know for sure if you see differences between men and women in adulthood, that does not mandate that that's a biological difference because it could be based on how the culture has brought up men and women to behave. And people still make the mistake of thinking it's biologically based just because you see differences in adults. And of course that doesn't follow.

RS: Is there a uniform sense of altruism you're trying to get at, are you seeing multiple forms at 18, 19 months of age?

AM: Yeah I would say that in our study we are trying to test the specific kernel core question about altruism, we're not really looking for variations. We're trying to see, can children at this young age give up something of value to a stranger to, to lend help to a stranger who needs it, to give up something that would be of intrinsic value to themselves. And what follows from that study will be a whole set of other studies looking at individual differences or circumstances in which altruism might be expressed or might be withheld or perhaps differences in family dynamics that bring altruism to the fore so children act in a particularly altruistic way because their family culture is to act that way. Some families you know behave in a much more pro-social helping way to others and to strangers. Some tend to be more fearful of strangers and more withdrawn and not giving, sort of staying to yourself and not, not helping others unless specifically asked to do so for instance. So the way the family-- the family values and how they act around the dinner table or in front of the child in the high chair probably makes a large difference and you can conduct studies to look at that diversity and how different kids respond to a-- a circumstance. And we want to design those studies after having you know established this first core aspect of human behavior. 

RS:  Imitation, what is it and your findings?

AM: That's a great question and imitation is a fundamentally important aspect of human beings. You know we're not born having all the skills, customs, rituals, and practices that we have as adults, or even that we have in kindergarten. And so an important question for developmental psychologists is where do those skills come from and they could come from a variety of routes. It could be that they mature and human beings without input from others would just develop these sets of skills anyway, that's option one. Option two is your parents explicitly teach you through rewards and punishments particular skills, that's a sort of a second option. A third option is that you discover them yourself through your own trial and error and the great developmental psychologist John Piaget in Geneva tended to talk a lot about the little baby on the, on their floor, on the floor, solving problems by themselves, a sort of an isolated problem solver. And so children can learn a lot of skills and practices through their own exploration and problem solving. But we're fundamentally interested in a fourth way that children could absorb or learn the skills, practices, and customs of their culture, and that is through observation of other people, through social interaction and observation of others. That is not teaching just self through trial and error, it's not having these skills being biologically wired and maturing. And lastly it's not that your parents explicitly teach you. It is this fourth alternative that the children are highly social and that we are using tools in certain ways and they observe us doing that and they can map the actions they see onto their own actions, they can absorb and imitate what they see you doing. And I think this is fundamentally important to our being human. We are simply not born with the skills, customs, and practices that we need to survive. We need to learn them and they don't all come through explicit teaching. They come, a lot of these skills come from watching others and being able to imitate. Now imitation itself is a complicated thing. And so there's many types of imitation and I have spent many, many years studying the development of imitation in young children because it is this fundamentally important way that they learn about people, they learn about objects, and they learn about themselves and their own powers and abilities from watching others. It is a very, very rapid learning channel in young babies. That's quite important. And it's something that Piaget tended to underestimate. Remember he had this sort of sequestered problem solver on his living room floor that he purposely didn't interact with when he was taking notes and observing, he-- he purposely wanted to see the child stages of development and what the child, what problems the child could solve at different ages. And my interest is exactly the opposite. My interest is what does the child learn from observing others, not only what did they learn from separate problem solving, what did they absorb from others and incorporate into their own repertoire. And part of the reason I'm so fascinated by that is every parent who has a child has this feeling that the child is just absorbing information and they can't understand how the child is learning so quickly, I felt that way with my own daughter. How did she learn this, where did this come from. And it becomes rapidly obvious that they're learning many of the things from watching others. And that's obvious with things like say tapping on a cell phone which children do nowadays, so that's not like sort of biologically given to pick up this hunk of plastic and tap on the screen. And it isn't really learned through parents reinforcing them because the parents often put down their cell phone and when the child toddles over to tap on it the mother says no, don't do that, that's my cell phone. Don't, don't tap on that you'll make a phone call to somebody, don't do that. So the mother's not necessarily rewarding that behavior. It's not biologically driven that the child does this and it would take them an awfully long time to learn to type on the computer keyboard, use the channel changer or use the cell phone if they were doing it through independent discovery like Piaget's study. In fact the children desperately want to type on your cell phone and they want to do that because they want to be like you, because they see you do it and they want to act like you and they imitate your behavior. So imitation is the root of many, not all, but many of the skills that children develop. And we as a field have spent insufficient time trying to understand the process of imitation because we were so enthralled by Piaget's theory of the individual problem solving that the children did in an isolated way, that we tended not to study imitation and what they learned through social learning.

RS: Both good and bad behavior is being imitated.

AM: Yes, that babies learn and absorb both good and bad behaviors from watching their adults and part of the watching the adults around them, watching their parents and their caretakers and their in-group and their peers and sibs. And part of the message as we try to share with parents that you are a role model for your child. You are your child's first teacher. Your child is learning how to interact with others and how to be in the world, indeed learning not only skills and behaviors but customs and attitudes and ways of being in the world and whether to respond in helpful ways and moral ways or not. And what standards are in this culture, they're learning all those things in part from watching you. 

RS: Potential biases can easily be passed on to that child.

AM: Yes, we do think that children learn biases and prejudices from watching the adults around them, in fact we did a very interesting study about catching bias with little 4 year olds, preschool kids, that we had a central adult interacting with two adults one on either side and they acted in a positive way with one adult and shared a toy and they acted in a very negative or prejudicial or bias way toward the other adult. And the 4 year old simply watched the central person act positively with one and in a biased way to the other. And then we asked the child who do you want to play with. Who do you want to share your toys with? And the children systematically and significantly more often wanted to interact with, play with, share toys with, a person that the adult had acted in a positive way with rather than the adult they acted in a negative way with. And so the upshot of this study with just 4 year olds is we published a paper saying babies or children in this case, that we published a paper saying that children learn bias from observing us. That's part of the way they learn bias and prejudice, simply from observing us. So you're right, they learn and imitate a lot of our behavior, the positive thing is they learn how in part how to, how to do, use important tools of their culture from watching us, they learn to turn on light switches because they watch us. It's not that you drag your child over to the light switch and say honey when you come in a dark room flip the switch, flip the switch. I'm going to give you, I'm going to reward you with a goldfish cracker when you flip the switch. Actually when the child comes in room they know to turn on a switch, they know how to use channel changers to change channels on the television, they know how to swipe on an iPad from watching others and so forth, they learn many things from watching us. But they learn good and adapt things, they also learn negative things from watching us. So we are role models not just for our teenagers, we're role models for our infants and that's such an important message for us all to get out to policymakers, religious leaders, philosophers even who have wondered where good and bad comes from and where these attitudes come from, taking into account how culture affects the little baby before there's language to communicate these things is really fundamentally important for understanding how we become who we are. Imitation, learning social lessons from others, begins right at birth. 

RS: What is the connection between imitation and altruism?

AM: So a large question and one that we'll need to do more empirical research on, I think many people around the world, many labs are studying helping in altruistic behavior. Many labs. Many of us are interested in this idea of do babies learn altruism and learn altruistic behavior by watching how that family interacts or having others act with you as a little baby in an altruistic and helpful way. And I think we don't know the full answer to that yet. My own feeling is that the cultural environment is important, that it matters what the family does and what I don't know at the moment is that whether that gives rise to the very first feelings of altruism children have or those feelings of altruism well up in the child beforehand and then culture helps channel and shape them.

RS: Can a specific action of altruism be inferred without actually witnessing or being part of having any memory of it. Do your experiments show that as an indicator? 

AM: So, no, I think that by the time children are 19 months of age they have what might be called a generative capacity for altruism, they can act altruistically in many different contexts, clearly acting altruistically in our experiment by giving a grape or blueberry to somebody else who is expressing a need or desire for it. That is not coming literally from imitation of others, it's really important to understand that, that imitation might serve as a foundation but it's not that they're copying the particular behavior that they have seen in-- before. So I think children who have never seen an adult drop a grape before would toddle into our lab and act altruistically and give the grape back to the adult who has dropped it and desires it. I think that's an important aspect of altruism, you can act altruistically in a generative fashion in many different circumstances. Clearly not, not because you're imitating that particular behavior. 

RS: Spontaneous reaction?

AM: The altruism that we see in 19 month olds are, you can think of as a spontaneous reaction, it's a creative response that children have at that moment about what to do to help this other person. You know they've never, you could imagine they have never seen it before. They quite literally have never seen this adult do this before. No one has trained them what to do with this adult that's for sure because they've just met this adult in our lab. So it's a stranger. Now the reason that I think that imitation might be related to altruism is not because they're imitating the specific behavior of giving back the grape, I do not think that's what's going on. The reason I think imitation could be important is the children have exercises and practice in recognizing that the other is like me and I'm like the other, we're similar to each other through previous bouts of reciprocal imitation with the others. So I, if I'm a baby I shake rattle, my mother shakes her rattle back at me, I shake rattle, the mother shakes rattle. We're playing a reciprocal imitation game. I'm recognizing the similarity between what I do and what another person does. I'm getting a lot of practice so that my body can do the same thing I can see you do. So I think imitation gives them a sense of I am like the other person in terms of actions, my arm moves their arm moves, my foot moves, their foot moves. I'm like the other person. And that makes a special bond between babies and other people, other people are like me. The lamp isn't like me, the chandelier isn't like me, the trees blow in the wind and they move, they move, but they don't move like me. The only thing that moves like me are those people out there. And that's because the baby can map the actions they see onto their own body and recognize the like me-ness at the level of behavior between self and other. But recognizing others like me in terms of action helps the baby now understand that another person is like me at a different level, they're like me in the sense that they have desires like me. They have intentions like me, they can be frustrated like me, they could want like me, and therefore I think the person, the baby, can understand when the adult extends their hand to pick up that grape, the baby can interpret that behavior as that adult wants that item. Now the child has to decide what to do and that's where altruism takes over. They share something with the adult. Even though it's of value to themselves. 

RS: It's an achievable goal?

AM: It's an achievable goal. The little baby and 19 months of age knows how to solve this, I think a little light bulb goes off. I think a little light bulb goes off in their heads, the adult drops the grape, baby looks down at the grape, looks of the adult and goes aha I can fix this. I can give the adult what they want and the magic is they pick up that sort of grape with grape juice on it and it's sticky and they have it in their hands and it's something very desirable and all they have to do is take it and pop it in their mouth and they can have this thing that they're biologically driven to have, more calories, this yummy thing. And yet they give it up to the adult. So it's a creative act to help the other person that's in need. It's related to imitation because imitation has helped establish at a very fundamental preli-- linguistic level that you are like me and I am like you, we're, there's an identity that we share. You behave like me, you have desires like me, you have frustrations like me, and I can relate to you as being a social emotional being. That's the way I think imitation comes into it. I do not think that the child is imitating handing a grape because they have seen somebody hand a grape before.

RS: A hungry child, same result?

AM: Well, we're very interested, we're in the middle of a study right now with hungry-- we are, we purposely have the children be particularly hungry when they come in the lab. And I believe the pattern of results that we're seeing so far are that even hungry children will do this and we'll have to see what the final results are. 

RS: Can altruism be taught?

AM: You know I think children feel-- can altruism be taught. I think if you had a human being or a species who felt no similarity between self and other and no particular recognition that the other person isn't like me and in need of help, you possibly could train like a pigeon, can in Skinner-ean sense, learn to peck a key when they see a cue, you possibly could train somebody to do, to help in a particular way when they saw a cue, but I don't think that's what human babies do and I don't think that's what humans do. Human adults do. Can it be taught, it probably could be conditioned but I don't think that's how human beings learn a sense of altruism. I don't think that we're helping the other because we are explicitly taught to do so. I think we're helping the other because we see the other person is in need and we want to help another person who is like me when that person is in need. And that's how human social emotional system works. I don't think it's due to conditioning.

RS: The neuroscience?

AM: Well, again what we're doing is we're looking at neuroscience of interpersonal touch. So we're looking at something again that I think underlies and relates to alt-- sorry. We're doing neuroscience on something that's fundamental and I think relates to altruism but it is not yet exactly the neuroscience of altruism. It's the neuroscience of how do I understand others and how do I understand that they're like me and I think we can establish a neuroscience substrate about that and that has led us to these really fascinating studies about touch.

RS: What are you finding?

AM: These studies about touch or there's a series of three studies and they build, if, if I have time to, to sort of do three studies. So in our first study using the Meg machine, the one that we have here in our lab at the University of Washington. Using this Meg machine we are able to touch the baby's hand or touch the baby's foot to see where their body is represented in their brain. And this is a really fascinating project that sort of has a little bit to do with the neuroscience of self concepts and sense of self in the baby. Not yet-- yet the sense of other, I'll get to that, but a sense of self. So in study one we touch the baby's hand or touch the baby's foot and we were able to see what part of the brain was activated when we touched those different body parts. And we found as one might expect that what's called the somatosensory area which is central in the brain, it's the central area going from the top of the head to the ears in that central region, not the frontal region, not the occipital region in the back of the brain but the central region, it's called somatosensory cortex. And we touch their hands and touch their feet. And indeed there was activity right in somatosensory cortex, it's very exciting, and it had been discovered previously by neuroscientists that needed to do in part that were interested in surgery when adults had epilepsy or when they had strokes, about what part of their brain controlled different parts of their body.  People had discovered and firmly established that in adults the hand region is in this somatosensory cortex about over here, over on the lateral side of soma-- somatosensory cortex. In your foot region it happens to be right in the middle of your brain. So there is a separation between the hand region and foot region. When we touch the baby's hand we were very excited to see that the baby's hand region, the part of somatosensory cortex over on the lateral side became activated and we touched the baby's foot, the foot region became activated. So that established something about the basic neuroscience in human infants. We were using seven month old human infants at that time. And then in the MEG in the next study we did really the exciting study which was to show the babies somebody else's hand being touched. So here their own body was not touched at all. They simply watched an adult's hand being touch and the really interesting finding is that when the babies saw the adult's hand being touched, their own somatosensory cortex became activated and tended to be activated in the hand region itself. So the babies, the part of the baby's brain that processes their own body is also activated when they see your body being touched. And we take this to be evidence of recognizing the like me-ness of others, part of a network that recognizes that others are like me, your hand is like my hand, your foot is like my foot. And the neuroscience studies are really fascinating because they're looking at the biological basis for that by looking at how the baby represents their own body and how the representation of their own body relates to how they understand your body.   So we did that in, within a touch experiment to begin with. And then we, we have now expanded to doing touch not only of the babies hands and feet but for various reasons we became interested in the baby's representations of lips and we moved to even younger babies, instead of 7 month olds we've now tested 60 day old babies, little 60 day old babies looking at their brain in the MEG, And the, and EEG, this is a sort of EEG cap that we have next to us, with babies have an EEG cap. And we have a wand where we can touch their lip or touch their hand or touch their foot. And that's time synced to the EEG. And we found where the baby's lip region is in their brain and that's exciting for us because lips are used for expressing emotional expression, they're used for nourishment, for eating in the baby, for imitating lip and tongue movements that they see. So we wanted to know where lips were in the baby's brain and we now have found those lips regions. The-- in the 60 day old babies. So the long and short of these neuroscience studies is that we can use very, do very careful neuroscience studies about how the baby's body is represented in their brain and how they represent other people's bodies like hands and other aspects of the body, how they represent in their own brain the bodies that they see and others. And all that is going to be used in studies ultimately of imitation and altruism because in imitation the baby needs to be able to map their ba-- body on yours when they see your hand open and close. They need to be able to open and close their own hand. They have to recognize the similarity between self and other. So, in my career I'm most interested in how does the baby recognize that you are like me? How does the baby have this initial sense that other people are like the self and there is this deep self other connection. And we're studying that through neuroscience to map bodies between self and other, we're studying that on imitation. How do they imitate the body movements they see you do like hand opening and closing and facial expressions. And we're studying that in this sense in altruism which I think draws on the fact that babies are helping others that they think of as being like me. Now you asked about the biological basis of altruism, we can't test altruism in two week olds. But we can test imitation in two week olds which I think taps this same aspect of you are like me and I am like you. And for those studies we are able to do things like open and close the mouth using the lips or poke out, in and out the tongue, and little babies, newborn babies would imitate those very simple actions that they saw you do. So I believe that young babies, even newborn babies, are able to recognize the similarity between self and others, some fundamental connection between self and others that exists at birth in human beings and that seed, that core is hugely important when mixed with social interaction provided by the family. The child recognizes those others out there as like me identified as being like me and the baby learns from watching their movements and their facial expressions and their emotional interactions and their moral or non-moral ways of behaving in the world than their biases or nonbiased activities that they engage in, the baby learns from all of that and absorbs that into the self and that's part of what why social development is so fascinating for us as, as developmental psychologists. It's questions about what makes us human, people have been asking for millennia. Religious leaders, philosophers, people interested in setting up governments to govern human beings in groups. All these things, all these scholars and leaders draw on their intuitions about what human beings are fundamentally like. But developmental psychologists have the privilege of sitting nose to nose with little babies to find out what human beings are fundamentally like at birth. 

RS: Lighting up the brain, what does that help you understand?

AM: Well, if you want to know where the baby's body is represented in the brain the only way of doing that is through neuroscience and we now have these non-invasive techniques such as EEG and MEG that allow us to, to make careful recordings of what part of the baby's brain become active, for instance when different parts of the body are being touched. You know touch is the first sense to develop in the baby's brain, that's one of the reasons I'm interested in it. And ironically it's one of the least studies in human babies from a neuroscience point of view. So we know an awful lot about babies' preference for the mother's voice or so we know about auditory perception, we know about visual perception, when do babies recognize the mothers or the father's face. We know about visual perception. We even know about taste and smell, they make disgust faces if, little babies, newborns do if something sour is put on their tongue. Even little babies make disgust faces or smiling faces if there's something sweet. So we know about taste and smell. We know very little from a neuroscience point of view about a sense of touch. Yet in the fetus the sense of touch is the first sense to develop and as, and as adults uh, touch has the largest sense organ in our body, we have 22 square feet of skin on our body. Our retina is a little patch in our eye and you know, we hear through, because we have a particular you know tympanic membrane that's small in our auditory canal. 22 square feet of skin. It's our largest sense organ, it's the first to develop. And so I'm fascinated about how the sense of touch develops from a neuroscience point of view. And again it's important from a social, interpersonal point of view because before there is language baby's skin is very sensitive and there's this language of touch and parents express caring and tenderness and positive emotions through stroking their baby, through touching the baby, and who could like anything more than the feel of babies skin, we're drawn to baby's skin, and babies have a touch hunger of wanting to be tactile-y stimulated.  Yet there has been very, very few studies of how the skin reports to the brain, how the baby's body is represented in the brain. But babies have a body, we have a bond. And when the babies see our body they process that in part through their own brain which processes their own body so there is a neuroscience interface between self and other right there to begin with and we're studying that in 60 day olds now with this in neuroscience work and we have done the self other mapping using the MEG where they have their own body touched and they can see somebody else's body being touched and we're detecting where that is in the brain. So that's a case where we're using neuroscience as another lever, as another tool to look at social emotional development in the baby and the whole baby, we want to look at behavior, we want to see altruistic behavior, we want to see imitative behavior on the outside, but then eventually we also want to do neuroscience studies to see what it's based on through brain reactions and by doing this entire research program we can begin to study the whole baby in context, not just one part of the baby but the whole baby. And it's you know it's exciting to do this interdisciplinary work to use some of the very new tools of neuroscience to ask these fundamental questions about self other mapping. It's an interesting way of new-- using neuroscience. This isn't you know, just sort of color vision. How did, where in the brain and how do they see red versus green or how is movement detected in the brain. These are things about social perception in the brain. How does the baby process that somebody else's body is being touched.  How does the baby process that. And that I think is ultimately going to play a role and be a component of sense of empathy, compassion, and altruism of helping others because you need to interpret their hand movements, right. But we're at the very, very early stages of this and we're just beginning to apply MEG technology to the, to the brains of young babies. It's a safe and very, very powerful technology that allows us to do social neuroscience with babies and we're excited to be able to do this social neuroscience with babies too young to talk. The mothers and fathers are fascinated by it. They get to see brainwaves in their own babies brains. They're excited. And we're excited to see what parts of the babies lights up to tell us about social perception. So it's a whole new frontier and it is fascinating to combine brain and behavior especially when you can do it on important and fascinating questions. What do babies understand about themselves and what do babies understand about others. How do they recognize the similarities between self and other. It's one of the fundamental questions you can ask about human beings. 

RS: What are some of the big questions you foresee over the coming year or two?

AM: Right now we're at the level of establishing, developing the first paradigms. We and many others in the world are studying, you know, young babies too young to talk, to develop paradigms to ask big questions. How do they imitate, what do they imitate, do they help others, do they feel a sense of altruism, so forth. These are big questions that we can ask them of babies. I think we want to link brain and behavior, next we'll need the tools of neuroscience and adapt them to young babies to address questions in social neuroscience. And then we're going to have to bring out the lens one step further and look at family and cultural interactions and how, see how family and cultural interactions affect behavior and how family and culture interactions affect the brain.  So we have the whole system, we have the baby's behavior in the context of the family and culture. And then the underlying neuroscience that underpins that. And what's important there is to recognize that neuroscientists now believe that culture in the family reaches in to help change the brain wiring and the brain networks and how the brain of that baby functions even when you study the baby's brain you're not looking at isolated piece of biology, you're looking at that baby's brain when their eyes have seen you know, report to the occipital lobe but it's been seeing how people act in the culture. Their ears are picking up sounds, the language of their culture, and that's affecting the auditory centers of their brain. Social perception is affecting other aspects of their brain that have to do, parietal lobe that has to do with the processing of their body and other people's body. So we don't think of the brain as being only a biological organ, we think of the brain as being shaped and sculpted by culture, starting at the very earliest time, starting from infancy perhaps prenatally. So culture is affecting the very wiring of that baby's brain. So for the future we're definitely needing to look at multiple levels of the baby, we'll have to look at the neuroscience of what's going on in the baby, the behavior that the parents see, and then the family and cultural context in which the baby is being raised and is generating their experiences.  And as developmental psychologists doing interdisciplinary work with neuroscientists and anthropologists and people who study AI and religious leaders who think about moral development in human beings. If we, developmental scientists, can bring neuroscience behavior and cultural context to the table to those discussions, they will be very exciting discussions indeed. 

-- In the I-LABS -- 

AM: Right, what we're standing in is the I-LABS, Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, MEG Lab. And it consists of a large room called an MSR magnetically shielded room, which means that it's not affected by magnetic field changes outside of the room because we're going to eventually here want to measure the brain changes inside a little baby's uh, head. And so it's confusing... but anyway so we're inside the Institute for Learning Brain Sciences MSR magnetically shielded room. Within this room is the MEG machine itself and then we would have a baby sit inside the MEG machine. And the magnetically shielded room filters out or means that magnetic field changes outside the room can't interfere with our signals. So this whole device is a device that's set up with 306 supercomputer quantum Interference devices that are called Squiz. 306 of the squid's are in this machine and what MEG does, it's like Star Trek, this is really quite amazing, what it does is it measures the magnetic field changes outside of the baby's skull when the baby thinks or feels there's synoptic connections and firings inside their brain and that makes a little minute electrical signal. The electrical signal changes the magnetic field outside the baby's brain. 

So this whole device, the MEG, the 306 Squids, are up here and it's being measured in that helmet that's called the door. This is the helmet. This is measuring the magnetic field changes outside of the baby's brain due to neural firings inside the baby's brain. And through very complicated and sophisticated software we're able to localize using what's called source localization, localize the source of the electrical activity where in the brain the electrical firings are that causes these perturbations in the magnetic field outside the brain. So The MEG was invented by physicists and now there are many MEG's used around the world to measure brain activity and localized brain activity. It has advantages over two other techniques, EEG and MRI, that you probably have heard of.

An EEG allows you to measure electrical activity at the scalp level. That happens when there's firing inside the baby's brain but it only measures activity at the scalp level. It doesn't allow you to get precise spatial localization inside the baby's brain. MEG has the advantage that it's inexpensive and portable but it does not provide very good spatial resolution. It gets excellent timing but not good spatial resolution. 

MRI you've probably heard of and maybe you've even sat in, or been in an MRI, usually you lay flat in the tube and it has excellent spatial resolution, it can tell you what part of your brain lights up when you do different activity but it does not have very good temporal resolution, it doesn't tell you when it happens it just tells you where it is. So classically we think of EEG getting good timing and poor space, MRI's getting great spatial localization with poor timing. And that's where MEG enters into the picture. MEG has very good timing, excellent timing, some millisecond timing, and very good spatial resolution. So it combines both space and time to get good accuracy on both dimensions. Furthermore it has this other advantage over MRI. In an MRI you lay in a tube typically, you're not allowed to move your head, if you move your head the MRI operator says you've ruined the MRI, stay still. Well, little babies are not very good at paying attention to the instructions of laying still. So when people do MRI's on babies they are usually asleep and so forth and we want to test activity where they need to be awake and alert and conscious, we're measuring aspects of consciousness in the young babies. So MEG is the precisely right tool for investigating the aspects of social neuroscience that we want to study, we can get time and space and the baby is allowed to move their head at least within the confines of this do or helmet that you see. So they are allowed to move their head. The baby can be awake and alert and looking at stimuli or feeling touches on their skin. They can consciously process them and the MEG allows us to say what part of the brain, where in the brain and when is the firing happening and that's what we need for social neuroscience. 

RS: Timing is important because?

AM: Yeah, timing is important because you're interested, say for instance, if you touch the baby's hand. How fast does the baby process the signal, when does it happen, and how does that relate to adult speed of processing and so forth. Ultimately timing is important. Ultimately when we do our next study and next study, to look at social interaction because one of the very important things about social interaction, save face to face interaction with a parent, is that when the child does something the parent responds quickly and then the parent responds and the baby responds to that. So a characteristic of social interaction in human beings is a serve and volley, a signal and return, a contingent response that happens quite quickly when you nod, I nod. I look in your eyes, you smile, I smile. There's social interaction that happens quite quickly. And so looking at social interaction, we'll take a device that is able to have fine timing. In fact now we're just beginning studies that look at what we call face to face neuroscience. This is the next step where we have the baby in the MEG and the mother is interacting with the baby and the mother is wearing an EEG cap with those sensors on the cap so we can look at brain to brain communication. When the mothers says something, smiles, or touches the baby, how does the baby's brain light up and when the baby responds to the mothers how does the mother's brain activity respond. That's what we call face to face neuroscience and we're using this MEG to begin to do that.

Q. MEG stands for?

AM: MEG stands for Magneto Encephalography. So it's a large word but it really just means Magneto, it's measuring the magnetic field that's coming from the brain. And cephalography for the brain. Magneto encephalography. And so we abbreviated it. Everybody around the world abbreviates it as M E G. 

RS: Accuracy?

AM: It's highly accurate. It's being used by people to study kids and adults with epilepsy in order to understand what's happening inside the brain and where the source of the epilepsy is coming from, where in the brain. So it is considered accurate at some millisecond level in terms of timing and adds a millimeter or two or three in terms of spatial accuracy. So it pinpoints quite precisely in time and space where the activity is to these inverse source methods which can be used with the brain signal that comes out of MEG. 

RS: Tell me what you're using it for.

AM: I'm using MEG at the moment for baby's sense of touch and how they relate to self and others, so we did a study with seven month old babies here that we published in 2018, we're really excited about. We were able to touch the baby's hand or foot when they're just sitting in this MEG machine and we could register how quickly there was a response in the baby's brain and where in the baby's brain there was a response when we tested-- when we touched these two different body parts. And we found something very sensible and yet exciting. We were able to locate the hand region in the baby's brain and the foot region in the baby's brain by touching these different body parts and see what was activated. Then we did the second study when the baby was sitting in this MEG machine and they-- they didn't have their own body touch, they simply watched as they saw a videotape of somebody else's hand or foot being touched. And lo and behold when they were watching somebody else's hand being touched, their own hand area lit up in their own brain, and that is really important for social interaction and social understanding. It means that the baby is understanding your body using the same sort of neural tissue and the same neural networks that they use in processing touch to their own body. So at the neuroscience level there is a connection between self and others as young as seven months of age.There is this deep neuroscience connection where the baby's processing your body through some of the brain networks that are used to process their own body. This is really important for this sort of social perception studies that we're doing and we have been studying classically behavior as you and I talked about, but now we're being able to get underneath the hood and see what's happening behind those beautiful blue eyes of the young baby, what's going on at the neuroscience level. Of course we're doing simpler neuroscience studies, we're doing neuroscience on touch. We're doing behavioral studies on imitation and altruism so that we can do more complicated things when we want to study altruism, the baby needs to move around the room and get up and walk and hand objects. We can't do neuroscience studies of that to begin with but conceptually we can use this MEG not only to look at basic auditory processes like listening to a language or basic visual processes like processing visual movement, but social interaction and social processes like, what does your brain make of seeing somebody else's body being touched. A familiar body part and you know you have a hand, you're a seven month old, you've seen your hand, you've felt your hand. Now you see a hand being touched, how does your brain begin to process somebody else's body being affected by things.  We think this is laying the foundation for social developmental neuroscience, a field that we think is going to explode. Social developmental neuroscience, how the brain responds to social signals, of a little baby, nothing could be more exciting at this time. 

RS: So watching a baby's brain lighting up tells you what?

AM: Well you can look at the baby's brain lighting up and ultimately we'll be able to use it to look at children with disabilities perhaps, and kids at risk for typical development. If we find vast individual differences on the one hand. On the second hand, in typically developing kids, you're one, interested in how it is the baby, baby's brain process for instance, social signals, and that could be interesting for a variety of reasons. For instance, you might be able to test social brain reactions to kids who were too young to express their reactions motorically. You might be able to test issues about altruism or empathy or social reactions before the baby can get up and toddle across the room. You might be able to show them visual scenes and see how the baby's brain responds to that.After all we are already showing them a very simple event, somebody else's hand being touched, that's an event. They don't have to respond to that, they don't have to jerk away their own hand, they don't have to do anything with their own body. We just want to see what part of their brain processes that. So ultimately our goal might be to show the baby very interesting social interactions where we can see how the brain processes it with a baby too young to behaviorally respond, certainly too young to walk around the room with it. The tools of social neuroscience need to be developed now using interesting stimuli like seeing somebody else's body being touched so that it can be used in future years to investigate these four fun questions, what does the brain make of social interaction when it simply observes it. What happens if you have a mother show a film of mother and father arguing having a negative interaction, having a positive interaction, mother and father or mother and baby where the mother is stroking in a positive affective way. A sibling, what does a baby's brain make of that, do they notice that as a positive event. Does it light up their brain as if they themselves are being stroked so that there is sort of positive effect of seeing you interact in a positive way with somebody else.  It would be difficult to measure a behavioral reaction from that. But one can use brain science to investigate that. And so we're just at the cusp now, really, at an important point in history, where neuroscience tools have been developed to a pretty high level to be used with adults and they're just being adapted now so they can be used with infants. And we're the first in the world who have this MEG machine all set up and tuned to study babies. There are many MEG machines in the world being used to study adults, but we're the first to have it tuned to study babies so we can correct for the baby's head movement. They don't stay still inside that helmet. They move their head and we can correct for those head movements when we want to do the analysis and we're excited to have this first in the world baby MEG and we think it's allowing us to make some very interesting discoveries. 

RS: And the implications of understanding the neuroscience, the brain lighting up in babies, help me understand that again, that will lead you to what?

AM: Well-- yeah. Developmental psychologists for many years have studied behavior and behavior is very, very important, it's what the mothers and fathers see, it's what we casually see everyday. But underlying that behavior is a brain that's sending out signals for the babies to move their arms and legs, smile at you, respond in certain ways. If you test babies young enough, sometimes you want to test them before they can make motor movements that would illustrate a certain capacity. You know, they may not have the motor movements to walk across the room or pick up a toy at a certain age. That doesn't mean they don't understand a social event. They may understand it, they might be giving meaning to things they see, but they might not have the ability to move motorically to show you that they do have that understanding. And if we begin to get interested in what's the roots of social behavior, how babies understand others, as we find out that babies are smarter and smarter, are now more and more younger and younger, pretty soon we exceed their ability to respond motorically. But the baby's brain might be whirring away and making sense of these social interactions that they're witnessing. And we developmental psychologists want to know that. So neuroscience becomes another tool for a baby who's too young to control their body and move in a specific way that we can study behaviorally. So oftentimes brain and behavior work in both directions, the behavioral scientists can tell the brain scientists what to look for. And that means the brain scientists can look at a particular part of the brain for their neuroscience mechanisms underlying the behavior. Sometimes the neuroscientists can discover things and tell behavioral scientists hey, look, the baby's brain is responding to this, can you design some behavioral experiments you may never have thought about before and design new experiments. So increasingly instead of having separate worlds of brain science being separate from behavioral science, we want to do interdisciplinary research that combines brain and behavior and we also want to include culture and family context with that because the culture is reaching in and sculpting the baby's brain.

We might be able to do brain science studies with children brought up in different family environments or different cultural customs and see the fingerprints of that inside the baby's brain on the brain wiring or the brain networks that are involved and that will allow the science to mature as we study the whole child and three levels, brain, behavior, family, and culture. If we can get all three of those coordinated which will take great interdisciplinary work, we'll be making great breakthroughs in our science of trying to understand what makes us uniquely human and what do we share with other intelligent systems. 

RS: Can a machine like this help understand challenges like autism?

AM: Yes, so yes. Autism is a really interesting example. One believes, there are theories around that suggests that children with autism don't have the same social motivation to interact with others as typically developing children. We've done some studies to show that children with autism are not as good at imitating the behaviors that they see other people doing. That connection, that fundamental like me-ness between self and other, the connection between recognizing your actions are the same as my actions, seems to be disrupted at some level in children with autism. Now that's being investigated by scientists all over the world, how to quantify that. And in what sense it's affected or not. But broadly speaking we certainly know that the social understanding and the affinity, affinity to interact with others and the sense of intrinsic motivation, social motivation to interact with others is not the same in children with autism as typically developing children. Now diagnosing autism is typically done when the kids are 4 or 5 and now it's been brought back to two years and 18 months and so forth. Wouldn't it be interesting if there were brain differences that could be measured even earlier than that when children with autism watched social scenes, that the brain parsed in a certain way if you are a child, child with autism, and the brain of a typically developing child parsed in a different way. That would be a great instance of what neuroscience could bring to the table to help all of us in developmental psychology or clinical child development to help children with disabilities and so forth. So brain science will be very interesting for early detection, it could be used, brain science can be used to see whether our treatments of children are having the desired effect. You treat a child. You could measure behaviorally whether their behavior changes in some way, but you might also be able to measure in a neuroscience way how the treatment is having effect before that treatment grabs hold and is already changing behavior. You might find early cues-- clues that your treatment is affecting how their brain responds. 

So just to be more concrete, if you showed children with autism in an MEG sort of social scenes or social interactions, one might make the prediction that their brain would respond in a quantifiably different way than when you showed those same social scenes to typically developing children. And you might see that at ages earlier than you can currently diagnose autism through behavioral responses. That could be of great interest. But to answer the age old 2000 year old question of, are we born social. Are we born with affinity to others? Do we treat human beings in a special way at birth? Do we intrinsically recognize the value and uniqueness of fellow human beings as opposed to a lamp post or a rattle or an inanimate object? That's a question that has intrigued religious thinkers, philosophers, and others for millennia.  We can use neuroscience to begin to address that, to show that babies, too young to speak, sometimes too young to walk, social scenes and non-social scenes and see how the brain of the baby responds to those. That's exciting because here we are answering questions that have interested people for 2000 years and we can do so with modern tools of neuroscience. It gets you up in the morning if you're a developmental psychologist, you want to come to work and do that.

RS: Is a machine like this in the future potentially able to predict behavior?

AM:The child could move your hands and so forth, and this child could not get up and walk obviously, but you could study simple behavior when the child's in here, you could study simple facial expressions, you could show the baby something that you might think is affectively pleasing, you could touch the baby in what you think of as a pleasant touch way, a way that communicates affective touch. Positive emotions. Parents do that all the time with the children, it seems to calm the children down. Babies smile. They seem to like it. So neuroscientists would have predictions about seeing positive emotion registered at a neuroscientific level. And you might be able to do that before the baby gets to express it in very, very many ways at all. Maybe the brain is pulsing and showing real positive affect and there could be individual differences. Some babies calm down and like to be touched. Some are resistant and don't like touch as much. Some adults differ in those ways. So neuroscience would be able to look at things that you can't see behaviorally and sometimes on simple behavior like emotional expression, I think we would be able to look at the underlying neuroscience at the same time as or in the same experiment as we're measuring simple behavior like emotional expressions. We can't do complicated behavior like getting up out of the chair and handing something to someone, but you could show them scenes of other people responding in altruistic ways or not, as the baby's brain processes that scene. You can look at understanding of the scene even if you couldn't look at the baby's own motor production. I think it is a great future of combining neuroscience, behavioral science, and you know cultural and family interaction styles, that really is the future of developmental psychology, to combine those three levels-- levels. It takes interdisciplinary work, sometimes universities aren't so good at doing interdisciplinary work, sometimes the teams are separately trained and they speak different languages, have different intellectual history and intellectual heroes in their field that the other fields aren't aware of. But more and more scientists are trying to come together across intellectual boundaries and more and more we want to do this science at multiple levels. It's the only way of understanding as complicated as the diverse intelligence of human beings, how we are, who we are. We don't just behave, we think and feel and we don't just have our brains responding, we have behavior. We're not just isolated human beings, we exist in a cultural context. We need all three levels and scientists can do that. 

RS:  In the future, would it be possible to predict disabilities or mental challenges? With a psychopathic adult, would an early look help in the future?

AM: Yeah, I think in the future we can begin to use neuroscience as early markers for identifying kids at risk for many different types of developmental disabilities, autism is one where there's a you know a syndrome that can be diagnosed when they're older. You might be able to measure things about young children who would feel a disconnect with others, perhaps some early registration of psycho-- psychopaths early, I wouldn't be looking at infants for that, but, but children in elementary school who later, who are behavioral symptoms and signs of those who are disengaged with others or don't feel the pain of other people. One is interested in looking at the neuroscience-- neuroscience of things like psychopaths and so forth, those are extreme cases. But it would be of interest to use brain science in two ways, one for early identification before you can see behavior. And second as a measurement of treatment, is your treatment having an effect maybe before you can start seeing that effect in behavior, and to provide an objective measure of whether your treatment is having an effect. So I think neuroscience is just another tool in the toolbox. It isn't everything. It is not the magic bullet. It's not somehow that neuroscience is going to tell us what makes us human, what makes us uniquely human and what is the distinctive characteristic of human nature.  How is it that we grow up to be an empathetic, feeling, compassionate, civilized adult. Neuroscience isn't the only arrow in our quiver for exploring that. But I think it would be a mistake to separate the brain and think that's just biology and we don't study neuroscience, we're study-- we're doing cross cultural work and behavior work and that's all we do, we don't do neuroscience. I think the important advancement in science is going to be to bring together multiple disciplines, indeed a discipline we haven't talked about is to bring artificial intelligence, computer science and engineering in this, because computer science can on the one hand build, help us build models, computer science models, good models of our psychological theories that help tune our psychological theories and make them more precise. And in the other sense, if our psychological theories are good we can sometimes embody those in robots that act in a certain way and test our theories by building robots that act the way our psychological models say. So another discipline to bring in here is artificial intelligence, computer science and engineering, and indeed we're beginning to work with collaborators at the University of Washington in the School of Computer Science, to bring them in to do brain science and behavioral science with us and they're quite excited to do that. I mean they look at a baby and they use a funny term for a baby. We call a baby, a chubby little wonderful-looking baby. They call a baby a biological model.  So they have a computer science model and they have a biological model. The biological model is the real young human being that's acting in this way. But we have very interesting seminars here at ILABS, our Institute for Learning and Brain Science, we abbreviate that ILABS. We have fascinating seminars here and in a collaborative brain studio that we've built, that brings together computer scientists, brain scientists, behavioral scientists and people who do cross-cultural work all together within the same studio so they can talk in a cross-disciplinary way. And it's you know, it's very exciting to be studying human behavior at multiple levels. It's the only way we're going to be able to understand something as complicated as a human being. 

RS: The arc of understanding a child's brain, where are we in that arc?

AM: Well you know one might say that we're just beginning to toddle in our understanding of what makes us uniquely human. What constitutes human nature and how we flower and develop in our families and cultures through social interactions. So we're no longer a fetus, we're no longer a newborn, we're probably beginning to toddle in bringing together the multitude? disciplines that will help us understand what makes us fundamentally human. But it is at root a question that science needs a seat at this table, science can bring very useful information to interdisciplinary meetings with religious leaders, philosophers and scientists, all converging on studying what makes us human. And I think we need the voices of everybody to help answer that question. 

-- New session of the conversation --

AM: So, what we're going to be looking at here is that touch study that we did with the MEG, and I want to show you the brain reaction in a 29 week old baby, 7 month old baby, when we touched their hand. And what we think is the adult hand region is somewhere in here, so we're going to be on the next slide, be touching a baby's brain and I want you to see what brain region become active. We touched... and boom we see the most significant activity where we expect, in the hand area, and that's very uh, interesting to find. Then I'm going to rotate the brain, that was the hand area, exactly where we might expect, I'm going to rotate the brain, because the foot area is in the middle of the brain, and the foot area goes right around here, and so we want to see what happens when we touch the foot area of the brain, and boom, we can see the foot area light up. Now MEG is a technology where we can localize right in the baby's brain where those areas are, and we discovered that foot areas light up when we touch their own foot, hand areas light up when they touch their own hand, and the really interesting thing was in the next study where they watched somebody's hand or foot being touched, and when they watched somebody's foot being touched then you'd see activity in the foot area and when you watch the hand in the hand area. And that shows that there's some similarity at a neuro-level between my hand and your hand. My foot and my-- and your foot. Or that our bodies are related to one another and this gives a baby a leg up on understanding the identity between self and others, typically developing children use some of the same neural tissue to process understanding perception of others as they do for perception of self. Now that may be disrupted in chil-- children with various syndromes, but typically developing children that show that, that um, close judgment between self and other, and I think that, that's the wellspring of a lot of pro-social behavior. It's what allows imitation, because children need to be able to see your hand, identify with their hand, and imitate using the same body parts or see your lips move, and then they need to relate that to their own lips, even though they've never seen their own lips in a mirror if you've tested them young enough.  They need to map your seen body of the other to the felt body of the self. So we're beginning to map out the neuroscientific basis of body perception. And how the body perception of self is related to the body perception of others, I think that's the first, the earliest, stage, the earliest foundation, for what will develop into feelings of empathy and altruism for others, there's got to be this fundamental sense that you're like me and I am like you, and we can ask that by using neuroscience with really quite young babies. 

RS: One day, will you be able to monitor altruism?

AM: Yes, we hope to be able to do that one day, we hope to be able to look at the neuroscience basis for altruism, perhaps a child can watch somebody else perform an altruistic act, and you might be able to see what networks in the child's own brain light up or become active. Indeed you might be able to have a problem posed for them where they're watching a live human actor want something that, that adult can't get, and now even though the baby in the MEG won't be able to get out of the MEG and help that adult, you might be able to see the neuroscientific evidence that, of what they're thinking about and what they're feeling, when the person in front of them has a desire that's thwarted, or an intention that they can't fulfill. And that means you'd be able to test very young kids, kids who may motorically not be able to help yet, but you can look in their brain to see what's going on. 

RS: When we see the brain light up, what are we seeing there?

AM: Well this is a complicated analysis of MEG signals that allow us through source analysis to see where the electrical activity is in the baby's brain. Where there are firings of the synapsis in the baby's brain. And when a hand is touched you see that activity as you'd expect, not in the frontal lobe, not in the occipital lobe, but you see it in the central area in somatosensory cortex. So that means that our MEG device is working perfectly for young babies, and our algorithms for correcting for head movements and doing source analysis, are working really well, because the hand area in the baby's brain is where we would expect it to be, that allows us then to do these social neuroscience studies, this whole brand new field of developmental, social, neuroscience. It's a big word but it really is just doing neuroscience with young babies about social domains. And all these pro-social things that we want to know about, how does the baby feel about being pleasantly stroked, which is a positive affect, how does the baby feel about the mother smiling at them, you ought to be able to see signals about that. How does the baby respond to watching pro-social behavior instead of negative behavior in front of them. Eventually, someday we'll be able to do neuroscience studies of all those kinds of things, and developmental science has just progressed from the old days where Piaget was studying a lonely child, on the living room floor, playing with objects by him or herself, to looking at social interaction which we were able to do behaviorally, to nowadays looking, having the baby watch social interaction, or engage in social interaction, while we measure their brain. So there's been a progression in our methods and how sophisticated our methods can be that are moving closer and closer to this developmental social neuroscience where the fundamental question is what makes this uniquely human, what's the essence of human beings, and we tend to think that there's aspects of social-emotional connectivity that are really fundamental to our being human. Playing chess is important, solving cognitive problems are important, but the whole human being includes the social emotional side, and my feelings toward you and your feelings toward me, and looking at the neuroscience part of that is a really exciting frontier.

RS:  Is that the future of this technology?

AM: This is-- MEG and MEG babies is the future of MEG. And we think that the future of so-- developmental social neuroscience lies largely with MEG, because it can measure time and space in the baby's brain and putting those both together is going to be very important for social interaction, if we just look at what part of your brain lights up, but we can't see your brain lighting up when I interact with you, if we don't get the timing right, that is not as effective a tool to look at social interaction. [16:03:39.19]

RS: Neurological issues?

AM: Right, so we are hopeful that we can use MEG as a device to look at children with autism, and we've already done some of that work, children with autism to be able to identify children at risk, or help clinicians diagnose autism for instance, as one syndrome, earlier than they might be able to do with behavior, but altogether one wants to look at how brain correlates with behavior, it's just that the neuroscience gives you an extra interesting tool that allows you to look, get underneath the hood, to look at what's happening after all in the brain, and as I say that will allow us to identify children in principal before those um, before you can measure it behaviorally. And in some ways it provides a very objective measure, that behavior is interpretable in many sorts of ways, by looking at brain science we can get another window on it. I think it is the future of developmental psychology and if you want to look at diverse intelligences, if you want to look at not only the human being as a cognitive problem solver, not only as a chess player, but as a person who interacts with others and feels what others feels and can stand inside somebody else's shoes, surely a very important part of being human, than one wants to look at social interaction, and social neuroscience. 

RCB: Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. 

RS: Altruism in toddlers, why?

RCB: Well I've, for a very long time I have been fascinated by the fact  that humans do show generosity and helpful tendencies and you can see it starting very early in life and you start wondering why does that happen. And I'll tell you personally,  so I moved to the United States when I was 9 years old and moved over from Mexico. And so I certainly didn't know any English, and so it was difficult to navigate the school environment. However there were children that tried to help me out. You know they showed me where to go, how to order the lunch food,  how to do the homework. And there were other children that didn't. And sometimes they, you know, even try to oppose my learning process. So it's interesting as I started thinking about the different in  how different socialization types at home could impact what children are doing at school. And so that drew me to become very interested in the origins of these individual differences and sometimes cultural differences in an altruism and generosity healthfulness. 

RS: What about toddlers is of interest?

RCB: Well when we start thinking about human development you know how can we possibly study the origins of something like altruism. We need to clearly be able to define an altruistic act and one way that we have achieved that in research is by you know say we drop a, a pencil or a marker. And then we reach for it. Are children then capable of showing that helpful response and we do it in toddlers because there's really you know when they're starting to walk. So this is really when they have the ability to be able to provide help if they would in fact want to provide help in that situation. 

RS: What are you finding?

RCB: So in our ongoing research we are finding that even when the object of help is something desirable such as a fruit. Children, very young infants, are still willing to pick up the fruit and even though they could perhaps eat it or do anything else with it they hand it back to the person that dropped it. So this is clear evidence that you know they are willing to provide others with help to show this altruism that you know we value so deeply in our culture. 

RS: Is it biological? How do you explain it?

RCB: It's very clear that other non-human species show some tendencies towards behaviors that look like altruism, sometimes they are closest relatives do in fact sometimes pick up objects on behalf of the people that have dropped them, especially if they are their caretakers. However this kind of very complex and self sacrificing mode of altruism, we believe is potentially human unique. You know this ability to, to not consume a fruit despite the fact that it's been dropped and it's, it's right there in fact. We're finding that children are in fact giving it back. This is unlikely to be shared by other animals.

RS: Explanation?

RCB: It's possible that it's actually part of our incredible human ability to collaborate. So perhaps tens of thousands of years ago there were selection pressures potentially on human cultures and on human infants. It's possible, it's possible, that those human groups that had children that for some reason happened to show more altruism, were more likely to survive. This is helpful for the species, for children to be able to collaborate by, by sacrificing on behalf of others. This is a mark of a very successful potential for the species. 

RS: 18, 19 month olds, why that cohort?

RCB: Well, developmental psychologists have generally been very interested around, around this age is really you know when they've mastered walking, they clearly are perambulating all on their own. They're noticing what's going on. They start engaging in social referencing, which you know they look to us, they look to their caregiver, they look around, they're looking for cues. You know around this age they are very, very eager to get to know others and get to know the environment. So that's why many developmental psychologists, including ourselves, we focus around this each period of, you know 18 to 20 months. They are very active toddlers and they're ready to show some of those human proclivities such as helping. 

RS: You're not using language?

RCB: Sure. So language is a fairly limited aspect of our experiment. You know, children come in with their caregivers, and we make sure that they're ok in the setting. You know they, they get the opportunity and there's some toys they can play with them, so they're, we want to make sure they're ok. And then after that, quite simply we bring out these fruits that they could potentially acquire and then we simply drop them off of the table, they clearly see us, that we intend, we want those fruits back. You know, we dropped them by accident. And so it becomes a question of, do children come on over to how to help out. How many of them do so? To what extent they do so, how quickly they do so, and we were finding they're very eager to help out. And this is again something that is quite miraculous once you really start thinking about it. [14:20:59.00]

RS: Any of them not?

RCB: Yes. A fair number of children sometimes don't help or will only help a little bit. So there could be many reasons, factors for that, perhaps they're not quite settled into the situation. Perhaps they are not particularly interested in touching the fruit. Maybe they would want to be helpful but they do not want to touch that particular fruit for example, or maybe they're looking over to their parent and they are trying to see what should I do with it, we certainly don't provide any clear cues as to what they should, what they should do, we simply show that we would like it back. Now there's many other things that could possibly do with it. You know, touch it and squeeze in and throw it around. But  this clear behavior of helpfulness, thankfully it does emerge and it's very, very unique and important. 

RS: How do you show you want it back?

RCB: So what we do is we, so we fumble it when we show it, so clearly it lands and they see it. And then we start reaching for it. So it's very clear that you know the experimenter would like to retrieve that fruit. It's abundantly clear and many children come on over to help. 

RS: Why fruit?

RCB: So fruit is one of those early consumables in evolutionary history that you know, human hunter-gatherer groups were eating and they were, fruits are not necessarily super prevalent outside in the environment. So they're kind of a treat you know, they're high in nutrient content, high and glucose. So these are desirable evolutionary healthy objects for children to desire. And there's been a lot of reasons why children would want these fruits and yet here they are giving them out to a stranger.

RS: The test is to see whether they give it back, eat it, give it away?

RCB: Yeah, so we are particularly interested in the behavior where they pick it up and hand it over to us, we see this as helping. However, yeah, children can do multiple other things. Of course they could consume it. And we do see some of that. And they, sometimes they walk around with it, they're just interested in perhaps displaying it to us, but they don't necessarily hand it back. But we are focusing particularly on those instances where children do, do hand it back, do help. 

RS: Have you got a sense of whether this altruism evidence at this age sticks with them or changes over time?

RCB: Well there have been, in our own research we have not touched that topic. However there has been other research that has found some stability in how children are coming to, to develop generally altruistic tendencies. You know some research and development psychology but also more broadly sociological, anthropological research that has looked at individuals over time or at least reports of individuals over time. And oftentimes there is a fair amount of consistency from an early age to a later age. 

RS: Gender differences or demographic differences?

RCB: So in our research we are not finding differences of gender or, or cultural ethnic background. One might think that it's quite possible that we might see those differences emerge, perhaps especially if we really undertook a study of that and had a large sample. You know, some hypotheses you know have been put out there. In the field of social psychology, people refer to the interdependent cultures and the independent cultures, so the interdependent cultures are those cultures that prioritize human relationships such as perhaps those prevalent in say East Asian contexts at least in traditional East Asian context societies. So it's possible that that study could be done, maybe we would find those results, however I'm not aware of those results being found yet.

RS: How do you define altruism?

RCB: Yes. So altruism comes from the French, altruism, which was coined by a philosopher Auguste Comte. So Comte was putting out there a philosophy of life which he believed should really focus on others. That was his phrase. (FRENCH), so to live for others he'd find that as the core ethical goal of the human species. And so since the time of Compte, researchers have been looking at that, have been looking at that altruism, that focus on other, willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the other. And here we are in our, in our in our study, we're focusing on that, you know when it really matters, when it's something like a food object that is, that has so many good positive nutritious qualities that infants should desire, do they ingest or do they give up for the experimenter.

RS: Do you raise the cost to them?

RCB: Yes so we have an ongoing study where we're looking at, to see if maybe when children come in at a time when they're perhaps slightly hungry, perhaps because it's their feeding time, are they still helping in those situations. And that's an ongoing study but we are finding that, that you know, sometimes they do help. And so that again is evidence that they are willing to provide this self-sacrifice on behalf of someone they've, they've just met. 

RS: How do parents, caregivers, mothers, react when they see their child doing this? 

RCB: So in our study we try to emphasize, I mean parents have something to work on during the time of the session, because we want to minimize that parental interference because we want to see children's autonomously driven behavior, what they're doing. However, sometimes parents might laugh, this is an interesting you know humorous situation where an adult is dropping fruit. Sometimes that might, might occur or sometimes you know they just gently observe without interfering. But of course the parent is always there and you know this is very important for children because they need that secure base in order to explore their environment, explore this new person and potentially help that person.

RS: Are there larger lessons for society?

RCB: I do. So we can clearly look at our own society and there's many situations in which people desperately need help and sometimes some people help them and many others don't. So starting in early childhood we can see that there are factors that can change the extent to which children are helpful. And so if children can do it, infants can do it. So should adults. And there has been research in adults that has increased helpful, generous tendencies. So you know looking at it from very early on really provides an opportunity to develop that tendency even earlier so that we can have that good compassionate society that for the most part we all want to, want to see happen. 

RS: Have you found any of these kids lacking altruism?

RCB: Well sometimes the children don't help, some, you know but there could be multiple reasons for that, not that they would not provide altruism in any situation for any circumstance. But rather perhaps in this situation that day, in this room, they didn't show that helpful tendency. But as we can see around our society even if you go to a school, children will oftentimes help in very different situations. So the fact that we might not observe children observing in one situation doesn't mean that they won't in others, so we need to be mindful of that always when thinking about our studies.

RS: All toddlers are altruistic?

RCB: Well, it really depends on the context. You know, are children allowed, are they in a context that they can show their altruism, because there's going to be some context, maybe a harsh environment, where maybe altruism is disadvantageous. And so in those situations maybe children might learn that they shouldn't show altruism, even though perhaps they would have shown it if the environment had been different. 

RS: Cultural component?

RCB: So, you know by culture of course we refer to the larger set of patterns of thought and behavior, action tendencies that human groups have. And it's very clear that parents find ways sometimes implicit or explicit to teach children that culture, to show it to them in their everyday lives. And it's possible that you know there might be some cultures on Earth that are extremely altruistic or accommodating to others, interdependent. And we certainly do know of anecdotes of those cultures and there's other cultures where children are always encouraged to focus on their own activities, focus on their own role in society rather than attempting to interact with others in some sort of compassionate manner. The emphasis there might be to do your own thing, focus on your own selves, focus on your own career perhaps, rather than on helping others advance in whatever way they might need. So yeah, these cultural tendencies, these accumulated tendencies that human groups have, certainly play a role. You know we just haven't done the research just on how it impacts very young children yet across the huge variety of cultures that there are, we need a lot more research on cross cultural research and infant development and certainly infant altruistic development. 

RS: What surprised you the most?

RCB:  I am most surprised by how quickly young infants provide helpful actions. It's not that they took a long time to figure out what's going on, why is this person out stretching their hand and to really get themselves together to help rather you know, if they're going to help they do it very quickly. As soon as they notice it.  Just like you know I think a fair number of adults do. So ready to show that that healthy tendency, there is very little barrier to it. 

RS: How are they processing what to do?

RCB: Yeah. So yeah exactly. There is very little prompting. But they have, they see that you know I have dropped a fruit and I am now reaching for it. So that means they are learning that humans have goals that they express through their body language, through their gestures, and so this gesture, going down, down, down, means that you know, I would like it back. Perhaps they've even experienced that in their own lives, right. They drop something and so they reach for it and may observe perhaps their parents coming back. So those are the types of experiences that facilitate their ability to understand this information that someone new is providing them. So yeah, that's why they're so quick to provide that helpful action.

RS: This attitude toward a stranger, how do you line that up?

RCB: Yeah. So oftentimes you know children come in for studies and for a particular study. And we can very clearly see you know there are already differences in the waiting room and how children are behaving, how they're interacting with others and with us. So clearly they, it all comes into play and they're, and they're developing, they're meeting new people very often, so they have to figure out this new person. Are they like the other people that I've met. So it's possible, but this region has been conducted so that you know something about their own behavior towards us is reflected back in how other people, perhaps their caregiver has interacted with them. 

RS: Are you involved in the neuroscience part of it?

RCB: So personally I'm not involved in the neuroscience part as of yet. You know there's a-- and when we're doing a behavioral study you want to make sure that you're, that it's 100 percent ready to go and then you move on to the neuroscience, perhaps in the future. 

RS: As these toddlers grow, are there lessons they are learning about altruism that you're finding through this study?

RCB: Well they're certainly, when they come out of our study they are, they have understood that in a new context there could be someone that needs help with something as simple as picking up their own food. And so perhaps the next time they encounter a situation like that they will be more ready to provide it. If they did provide it, maybe they'll even be faster at it, and going forward you know, they'll be on the lookout for cues that others need help and so they can expect some level of compassion. So you know this early experience of being tested could be a predictor of later behavior and we just don't know yet.

RS: Do you think kids are naturally altruistic or do they learn through parenting?

RCB: I think that there is definitely a deep tendency in the human species towards altruism. We can see that, we trace it back through other species. However, the environment can have an incredible consequential role. I mean I'll give you an example of a study way back in the 80s. You know they showed children that were in environments that were abusive. Those children certainly were not providing compassion towards others. They were actually providing aggression when someone needed help. So these 1 and 2 year olds, they would go over and kick their toddler that needed help. So children are ready to learn. They may see that the world is a place where people are helpful or not and act accordingly. You know, parenting, caregiving, the environment has a huge role regardless of our biological tendencies. You know, these tendencies have to be developed and nurtured in a context that actually supports them. If the context doesn't support them we know that children won't show those tendencies.

RS: They are impressionable?

RCB: They are extremely impressionable, they're ready to learn, they're born to learn.

RS: When the toddler gave you the grape, was there an attaboy, attagirl reaction on your part, or not?

RCB: Not at all. We simply move on to the next... 

RS: There's no reward?

RCB: There is no reward. There is no reward for their helpful actions. In fact they continued to show helpfulness, even time after time after time, even though they have not received a reward. 

RS: Do you distinguish between altruism and empathy?

RCB: So empathy really refers to the ability to feel or understand other states of, of thinking, of feeling. Whereas altruism tends to refer to the actual behavioral display of help towards another. So they're clearly related. It would be difficult to act altruistically if one didn't empathize with the other person, meaning notice that you know they need some help. So I think in developmental psychology perhaps we generally believe that empathy comes first online and then we get all altruism built on top of that once children start understanding that other people are present and they have their own desires and needs and so once the infant is physically able they can help that person out.

RS: Challenges ahead?

RCB: Well, in our study we will continue to push ahead but we really want to know does this behavior last, is it, does it go beyond in other contexts, how far can we push it. Is, the fruits we know we show them, but maybe there could be other desirable objects that children could really want. So to what extent will they be willing to self-sacrifice, give up something that they want or is even theirs for someone else. It's really an open question and that poses you know a lot of, a lot of challenges. 

RS: Fruit, what about a candy bar?

RCB: Exactly. Well perhaps you know we in psychology would call them, we call certain object's hot right, so you know there's a famous marshmallow study for example that's a hot object and so children waited for that. In that study they handed over to the experimenter, you know the point was to see if children could withhold their own impulses. But it's, it's certainly fascinating to think about you know yeah, would they be willing to give up a candy bar or some chocolate. And that would be even more startling perhaps.