Learning and Memory Blog

My weekly takeaways from learning and memory class :)

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The Strange Magic of Memory: How Songs and Smells Take Us Back

Have you ever been walking through a store, and suddenly a song plays that just stops you in your tracks? In an instant, you’re traveling back to a moment in time you didn’t even realize you had tucked away — maybe it’s a high school trek, or the initial few months of your relationship when you were all about your partner, or maybe even when you were depressively struggling to get through the first year if college with no friends around to support.

Or do you ever just randomly get a whiff of something cooking, or smell a flower that immediately transports you back in time to summer vacations in middle school at your grandma’s place? This phenomenon, which is almost universally experienced, is not just coincidence or random nostalgia. There’s actually some science behind why this happens, it’s called the transfer-appropriate processing effect.

What this effect says is that memory works better when the conditions at the time of recalling them are the same as the conditions when you first experienced it. Episodic memory, what the memory of events in your life is called, is not isolated. It’s deeply embedded in the spatiotemporal context. It’s not just about what you consciously remember — it’s about the tiny, background details too: the sounds, the smells, the environment. When your brain recognizes those familiar cues, it becomes much easier to pull up those stored memories. 

Music has always been one of the strongest memory triggers for me. I have playlists from different phases of my life, and sometimes I’ll put them on shuffle just to see where they take me. One song instantly throws me back to my senior year of college — late nights cramming at the library, drinking bottles on bottles of terrible sting , just blindly hoping I get through the night. It’s not just the memory of studying that comes back; it’s the full feeling of being there. I can almost feel the AC on my skin, the musty smell of the library sofas. Smells do it too. The scent of this particular brand of sunscreen immediately reminds me of swim lessons at the nearby pool, the disgusting changing rooms, the nicest driver uncle who used to take me there, and the strict coach who I used to be terrified of. And of course, visual cues are quite the time machine. An ad from back then, or spotting my old favourite sweater will take me back to when all of the kids in the neighbourhood would get together to trouble everyone with ding dong ditch!

But, it’s not just about what’s happening in the surroundings, though. Transfer-appropriate processing effect also includes the physical context. Physical feelings and emotions also come rushing back in presence of such cues. You may feel your stomach turn when you hear your school’s anthem, which was sung in assemblies you were punished for reaching late to. When the external conditions match up with those old memories, it creates a bridge that makes it easier to retrieve them. 

Lately, I’ve been wondering if this effect, which so certainly associates the context of the memories with their content, can be used strategically. If we know certain cues help lock in memories, maybe it makes sense to intentionally try and save memories by organising them in specific contexts. Maybe, now that I am about to be at a new campus for an internship, I will wear a specific perfume everyday, so each time I wear it later, I am brought back to memories of the stay. Maybe each time I go on a trio with my friends, there will be a special playlist dedicated to it!

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How I wish I was Mike Ross from Suits

Mike Ross from Suits was my ideal, the genius without a legal license who made it to the top most legal firm without ever taking the LSATs (for himself) or being called to the bar. How? He has photographic memory. He could flip through pages and pages of text and perfectly remember and recall the minutest of details, and also understand things at a deep conceptual level automatically. Impressive, right? I wish it could be that easy for me too, but unfortunately, that’s not how memory works for the average person. 

You, and I, and any random person needs to put in way more effort for encoding memories. In fact, there’s three principles that govern memory encoding, and how I learnt them through very real experiences: Principle 1. Mere Repeated Exposure is not enough to guarantee memory.

As soon as I got the results for my 7th grade final examinations confirming I had passed, making it to the first of the big boy grades: 8th grade, my mom told me to get my math book, copy all the algebra formulae (you know, (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b² and the like) onto a huge chart paper, and paste them on my wall. She believed that looking at them above my desk every day would improve my memory of them. And I did exactly that, looked at them day in day out all through my summer vacation. But as soon as the opportunity arised to actually use them in a class test, my brain was all crickets. That’s when I realised, merely being exposed to the formulae did not mean that I would remember them or be able to apply them.

Principle 2. New Information is Easier to Remember if You Relate it to Things You Already Know.

I used to be horrible with names. I would be meeting a new person, learning where they are from, what they do, even registering everything about how they are dressed. But as soon as they were about to tell me their name, my brain would loudly go LALALALALA, making absolutely sure I forgot it before they were finished with their sentence. In the long run, this could cost important connections. So I decided to adopt a strategy of connecting their names to some piece of information that already existed in my mind. A junior introduced herself to me recently, and her name was the same as my preschool teacher who would always have cotton candy for me when I missed my mom. I just imagined this junior with some cotton candy and now her name has permanently made its space in my mind. Thus, making connections to previously existing info makes it way easier to remember new stuff!

Principle 3. Deeper Processing at the Encoding Stage Improves Recognition Later. 

In 2nd grade, my general knowledge classes had a quiz at the end of them, where the teacher would ask for world capitals, and each correct answer would get you a whole dairy milk! For the child me, that was the most coveted item ever. I put in hours of work, taking a list and trying to memorise the capitals, but to no avail. They were just random words to me with no meanings attached, and I would literally see them float around my brain with no anchor and routinely jumble them up. That’s when my mom intervened. She told me, if I really wanted to memorise the capitals of all the countries, I would have to get to know them. She sat me down on the family computer, taught me how to google country capitals and go to their wikipedia page. She would ask me to look for things like important monuments or attractions in the city, what people ate there, what language they spoke and more such details. She also bought me a huge world map, which allowed me to geographically place the countries. Having actually engaged with the material and processed it deeply, I am proud to say I was the receiver of the most chocolates in class!

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A Spotless Mind

No film captured my imagination as a teenager the way ‘Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind’ did. A couple, heartbroken and exhausted of each other after a break-up, decide that they want nothing to do with each other. So much so that they don’t even want to remember they were ever a part of each others’ lives. They decide to take the services offered by the New York city ‘Lacuna’, where they ask you for all belongings you have that remind you of a person in your life, and then plug you up in some machine which systematically erases every single one of your memories of that person, starting from the recent ones all the way back to when you met them.

However, as the machine is deleting the guy’s memories, it is doing a replay of them in his head and as soon as it reaches the initial, sweeter memories, he realises he doesn’t actually want to forget her and wants to earn her back. He tries his best to hide her memories in other, unrelated corners of his mind where the machine memory erasers can’t touch them. At the end of it, he manages to retain one crucial bit of information which leads him back to her. 

Apart from the romance of it all, what has always intrigued me is if there actually could be some sort of machine that simply erases a person’s existence from your brain? Because there sure are some exes I would like to forget!

That’s why, when I learnt of something called concept cells in the brain, something clicked. What are they? How do they work? And most importantly, can they be eliminated to get rid of certain, ahem, concepts from my brain? Concept cells are cells housed primarily in the medial temporal lobe, especially the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, and the amygdala, which respond to specific people, objects, or ideas regardless of which modality in which they are presented. You could be looking at a picture of Kate Winslet, hearing her voice in a video, or even simply be looking at a picture of the Titanic, and the same cells would fire. Thus, these cells don’t just represent specific features, rather, they are representative of abstract concepts, making them crucial for abstraction, generalization, and discrimination from other concepts. They are also quite efficient in representing concepts because they form new concepts quite quickly, they respond to a variety of modalities, be it pictures, spoken words, or written, and also they utilise something called ‘sparse coding’, in which only few neurons fire for a particular concept, but strongly. 

Coming to the real questions, can these neurons be eliminated to get rid of a concept? These cells are quite selective, which means that a certain set of them will respond very strongly to only one concept and quite weakly or not at all to others. This would imply that there may actually be a way to do away with some of these and forget unwanted people. However, there is some degree of overlap between related concepts. There is something called ‘semantic clustering’, which means that cells that fire for similar concepts, are located close together in the brain. So say, if you were to erase Kate Winslet from your memory, you run the risk of also forgetting Leonardo di Caprio, or at least have some sort of lacuna (that was definitely deliberate) in his concept. Additionally, concept cells are also part of a larger memory network. Eliminating some may erase or weaken certain memories, but because memory is also distributed across the brain, not all traces of it would vanish.

So, the verdict unfortunately is no. I cannot simply erase my exes from memory and will have to forever live with the memories. Consequences of my own stupid decisions I guess!

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My Life is a Movie, and I’m the Target Audience

As a baby, I started sleeping like a baby, and never stopped. Sleeping is one of my top hobbies. On top of that, I am one of the blessed ones who can actually take power naps and wake up energized. Doesn’t really sound like something I should be proud of, right? It just might be, and I’ll show you why: 

Hippocampus, the cute seahorse in our brains is this super talented structure that is the brain’s archivist. It is crucial for spatial memory and navigation, as well as short-term and long-term memory formation. Interestingly, a cool little thing it does is ‘hippocampal replay’. Let me give you an example: You have an exam tomorrow, and the content that you have to memorise are 5 different sets of slides. You've read and re-read them and then gone through them twice more, just in case. But you’re still not sure you’ve registered anything. Fast forward to the next morning, your exam is in 20 mins, your friends assure you that you’re not the dumbest person alive, and you have retained what you read. But you remain unconvinced. What do you do? My go to strategy has been to really really quickly mentally replay all the slides in order to just sort of make sure it’s all in there. That is basically what the hippocampus does with all the memories it has recorded over the day, during sleep it hits rewind, and you have the entire movie play out in your head. However, don’t get me wrong. The brain’s not a narcissist just replaying memory because it’s obsessed with itself. Just like me replaying the exam content in my head, hippocampal replay is very useful to solidify whatever information has been obtained. Let’s see what exactly happens. 

Hippocampal Replay: What exactly it is

Hippocampal replay involves a fast forwarded version of neural firing patterns that happened during the formation of a memory occuring again. Especially for spatial navigation, during hippocampal replay, a sequential reactivation of the hippocampal neuron (place cells) takes place, which is the same as the firing pattern that had occurred originally, except much more rapid and compressed in time. The purpose of this is memory consolidation, which is basically the strengthening of connections between neurons so that the experience is stored to the long term memory. This hippocampal film is not only fast-forwarded, but may also be reversed. Reverse replay is believed to be helpful in connecting behaviours to their outcomes, again promoting learning and strengthening memory.

And again, the brain is smart (self compliment much?). Just like in any movie, not every scene is worth a rewatch, in the hippocampus, not every experience is worth a replay. Hippocampal replay is particularly biased towards events which had a salient element. Ofcourse, on a road, wouldn’t you like to make sure you remember where you had found the best momo in the city, and ALSO where traffic police fined you?

Interestingly, hippocampal replay also occurs during wakeful states, which happens immediately after an experience, which is played out much faster than in real time. This reflects its involvement in helping an animal or person in planning and decision-making, or choosing the best strategy to obtain a reward. 

Dreams and the Hippocampus

Have you ever spent hours bingeing a TV show, only to find in your dream that all the characters are actually your best friends and you are totally a member of that universe? That makes me wonder whether dreaming is what hippocampal replay manifests as. Although research (Spano et al., 2020) has shown that hippocampus is integrally involved in dreaming, whether it is due to hippocampal replay remains a mystery. 

However, now you know how important it is for memories to become stable, so go ahead, take that 20 hour beauty sleep and turn your brain TV on!!

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It's Snowing Words

I am sure you have heard that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. This fact has been taken as the primary evidence by Benjamin Lee Whorf for his linguistic relativity hypothesis, which claims that language, or vocabulary, shapes or constrains the speakers’ view of the world. According to the Whorfian hypothesis, because these languages have numerous terms for snow, they are more adept at distinguishing between its different kinds, and english speakers (or other languages which have a limited vocabulary for snow), will not be able to grasp the subtle differences between different forms of snow that Inuit speakers can. 

While it has been quite exaggerated in support of the Whorfian claim, there is some truth to the fact that North American/Arctic languages (such as Yupik, Inuit) have a vast and rich vocabulary for snow-related words. To give you an idea of the extent of the range, these languages distinguish between fallen snow on the ground, frosty snow, clinging snow particles, fresh snow, snow on the water, and so on. Regardless of whether or not the vocabulary is shaping the thoughts of speakers or not, I believe there’s a very simple explanation for why languages of the Arctic dwellers developed numerous words for what we simply call snow, and why they can perceive the differences between all its kinds so swiftly and easily. They reside in places where snow is around everywhere all the time. For them, navigating life means navigating life in snow. The richness of their vocabulary reflects an environmental and communicative need for the same. And consequently, because the Arctic dwellers are constantly surrounded by snow, they develop a perceptual advantage in telling apart all of its different forms. 

This phenomenon of learning, where mere exposure to the stimuli (in this case, snow), influences how you perceive a stimulus is known as perceptual learning. It is a passive form of learning where without conscious effort, repeated experiences with a set of stimuli improve one’s ability to distinguish between them. Perceptual learning also explains why my mother can tell just by touching a saree what sort of silk it is while I can barely tell cotton apart from silk, or why women into makeup can tell apart a million shades of lipstick while it would be a miracle if other went beyond the brown-red-pink-purple vocabulary, or why artists can tell just by touch the GSM of a sheet of paper! 

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Child-Speak is Actually Quite Logical

Generalization, in learning theory, refers to the extrapolation of learning of associations with one stimuli, to new stimuli one may encounter. Generalization may be similarity based, that is, learning is more likely to be extrapolated to new stimuli which closely physically resemble the one for which it was acquired. A classic example in experiments is – a pigeon trained to peck at a yellow light for a food reward will also display pecking behaviour when presented with yellow-orange or yellow-green light. Learning forms a ‘generalization gradient’, in which learning is extrapolated most to very similar stimuli (continuing our previous example, yellow light → yellow-orange light), a little lesser to slightly different stimuli (yellow light → orange light), and reduces as the stimuli become more and more distinct (yellow light → blue light). The basic principle behind generalization is that the animal or person believes that a similar stimulus shall have the same consequence as the original one. It is a prediction of the likelihood of a consequence based on past experience. Further, overgeneralization refers to when the learning is extrapolated to a very broad range of stimuli (say, the pigeon pecks at any light regardless of its colour). Here, the generalization gradient becomes flat.

A very interesting example of where overgeneralization almost routinely takes place is overgeneralization that children exhibit while acquiring language. Overgeneralization is the generalization of a linguistic rule to places where it does not apply. Often, children learn a grammatical rule or pattern through observation, but they tend to overextend it to a broader set of words/linguistic structures than it actually applies to. I’ll explain what goes on behind this phenomenon:

A theory in language development proposes that language acquisition is primarily driven by the detection of statistical regularities of certain structures and rules which are then incorporated into one’s own usage. You know how they say that reading a lot or watching media in a new language is the best way to learn it? You could spend months memorizing grammatical rules of a new language and still falter, but the more you are exposed to it, the better you get at it. I know this first hand because I took a Japanese course for 2 years and somehow my brother, a huge anime nerd, is somehow more proficient at it than me. This statistics based learning also applies to children acquiring their very first language. They learn through recognizing a pattern of grammatical rules which they observe. 

English being the unpredictable, unstructured language it is, has more exceptions to its rules than not. Which is why it is especially prone to the phenomenon of overgeneralization.

This explains why, for children who have by their grand age of not very many years, learnt a rule, will logically extend it to places where it doesn’t apply. I shall illustrate this with an example: 

Imagine a child 2 years old. She has learnt how plurals work. You add an -s, and voila! Book? books. Pencil? Pencils. Bag? bags. House? Houses. Of course, what else could it be? But then you encounter the word ‘mouse’. Based on ALL the evidence she has gathered, the obvious answer is that its plural is ‘mouses’. Same goes for why children might make the adorable mistake of saying ‘goed’ instead of ‘went’, or ‘eated’ instead of ‘ate’. 

So, now you you know – what you might have thought of a simple silly mistake that most children make because they haven’t developed a lot of brain cells yet, actually has a very smart logic behind it, based on statistics based learning and the very reasonable generalization of the learnt rules to other places where it should ideally apply!

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How I discovered that every good sports coach must be a psychological genius

My evenings a few years ago consisted of being the most wonderful, kind, amazing, dedicated older sister ever (I used to take my brother to his table tennis lessons, sit there for two hours while he played, and take him back home, never forgetting to stop by to sneak a quick snack without letting our parents know). But because I would sit in the court and observe how the coach went about coaching the kids, I noticed a certain strategy he would follow to get the kids to do better. 

He would begin with teaching the kids the basics, needed to even begin thinking about table tennis – where to place your thumb and fingers while holding the racket and at what distance from the table to stand. Then he would move on correcting their posture – at what approximate angle to bend your knees, how to keep your elbows, how to bend your torso forward, and so on. Next, he would ask teach them the basic movements – at what angle to hit the ball as you serve, how to outstretch your arm, how to move your wrist when you have to take a backhand shot, how to move back and forth and to the sides depending on how the ball arrives to you, and so on. When a kid would perfect these, he would work on bettering their ability to handle a speedy serve and also to hit fast. 

Very interestingly, at the beginning of each of these sections of training, he would be very encouraging, letting the players make quite a lot of mistakes, and would reward them with a public compliment or exemption from ball collection duty for each time they would get something just right. However, as time went by, and they became better at one particular section, he would stop rewarding them for it. Now, the rewards only come if you get the next, more advanced thing, right. So on and so forth went the training till all the kids became quite skilled. Seems pretty standard of a sports coaching strategy right? Of Course you don’t begin with expecting a novice to pick up advanced skills, you gradually increase the expectation in terms of difficulty to be handled. 

But, I have only now realised the psychological mechanism that is behind a training strategy such as this. In reinforcement learning, something called ‘shaping’ is utilised to get the subjects to learn complex behaviours (such as, you know, playing a sport). Usually, the reinforcement learning paradigm involves a skinner box in which an animal is left to accidentally discover what behaviour will get them a reward (or save them from punishment). A simple behaviour such as a lever press or pecking is what’s desired and then reinforced/punished. But what about when the learning of a complex behaviour is desired? It is unreasonable to expect an accidental approach to be able to lead to the learning of complex behaviours, so, the desired behaviour is broken down into smaller components, and each ‘successive approximation’ is rewarded instead. Also, it is important to withhold reinforcement for an approximation stage behaviour that has been acquired. This intuitively makes sense because if one keeps reinforcing a behaviour, there will be no motivation to improve or make progress towards the next, more complex approximation. Gradually, brick (approximation) by brick (approximation), the complex behaviour is learnt, and hopefully my brother is on his way to being a table tennis champ!

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A Moment (not so) Magical

Back before life humbled me, I was stupid and in high school. One of those years, there was excitement in the cool September air, and silly little starry eyed me was all pumped up to go get absolutely smashed with her friends on her birthday. Who could have known what was to ensue on that fateful night? We went out all giddy to an alcohol showroom, and I thought to myself, this is going to be wonderful, and proceeded to make the worst possible decision I could have. What did I pick? Magic moments (why so many teenagers’ first tryst with alcohol in India is Magic Moments with the most horrifying story following could be a study in itself). 

Long story short, in a series of unfortunate events (they were conscious decisions but I would rather not accept that), I drank a lot too fast on an empty stomach, and got very very sick after, threw up a million times and passed out. However, I was a teenager and was just getting started with alcohol and fun, there was no way I was letting myself build a negative association with drinking, which in hindsight is the obvious cause of my sickness. What instead happened, is that I developed a strong aversion to the Peri-peri nachos I snacked on while drinking. From there on, I could not stand the sight of one of those red-black packets, let alone the smell or the taste. Despite the innocent nachos not having played any role in my sickness, a singular whiff of them still makes me want to throw my guts up. Ever since, I have avoided them like the plague. 

One scientist by the name of Garcia would explain what happened to me really well. This whole episode is a classic example of conditioned taste aversion, or the Garcia effect. Conditioned taste aversion is a form of one trial learning, where an animal or a person develops an aversion to the taste of a stimulus that is paired with another aversive stimulus, in just one exposure. This is believed to be an adaptive mechanism evolved to help animals steer clear of stimuli which are clearly harmful for them. However, the stimulus to which the aversion develops may not necessarily be the one which causes the negative reaction. In Garcia’s original study, rats who were made to consume sweetened water prior to being irradiated, developed a strong aversion to sweetened water and consistently chose tap water over it, despite rats preferring sweetened water in normal circumstances. Afterall, it wasn’t really the nachos that made me sick. This is precisely why conditioned taste aversion is an interesting phenomenon. Until it was discovered, associative learning was known to require multiple trials for the association to form.

Additionally, this aversion only develops to certain kinds of stimuli, mostly gustatory and olfactory ones. Case in point: I still love my friends who I drank with very much and their faces absolutely do not make me want to puke. 

One might now wonder, if such an effect exists, did it happen to all my friends as well? The answer is no, even though we all got sick, I was the only one to suffer from the curse of never being able to eat nachos again, simply because I hadn’t had them before. All my other friends, who had snacked on them countless times before, devoured the leftover packets the next morning. How and Why? The answer lies in another conditioning phenomenon: latent inhibition. Latent inhibition refers to the learning of a cue’s irrelevance when one is exposed to it in absence of another significant event to associate it with. What that means is, you learn that a cue does not indicate the occurrence of any other stimulus when you have learned that nothing happens when you are exposed to it. In my case, since my friends had eaten the nachos without any sickness following, they were inhibited from forming an association between them and sickness. Isn’t it fascinating how these phenomena work?

So, that’s how the story of my first and last stint with nachos goes. I am sorry to any Mexican cuisine enthusiasts here, but count me out of the plan if there’s going to be nachos on the table :(

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Autism and Habituation

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An amazing comic by @kyahcomic on Instagram about Autism and Habituation!

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 Is Daal Chawal For 50 Years Till You Die Such A Bad Thing?

A key kind of learning is habituation. It is the decrease in response to a stimulus over time when it is presented repeatedly. If you are familiar with the economic concept of diminishing marginal utility, every subsequent piece of even your favorite chocolate is going to be less enticing. The new dress you just LOVED and thought would wear everywhere, is starting to seem kind of ugly and boring after two wears. One of the worst consequences of this may be seen in relationships, where once the initial spark dies down, once the honeymoon phase as it is known is over, you may start getting bored of all the little things that you once found oh so endearing about your partner. 

However, in some cases, habituation may be beneficial. After all, it is a learning mechanism. People from Delhi might relate, where every other street is named “naala road”, it’s a good thing you habituate to bad smells or else it would be impossible to function because of the stench. THANK GOD you habituate to noises you hear repeatedly or by now you would probably be in jail for murdering your upstairs neighbour, right? In fact, disruption in habituation as it happens normally is associated with ADHD, autism, and even schizophrenia.

How a number of classic symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be explained with impairments of habituation is quite interesting. Neural habituation is indicative of learning. Processing of faces is a key component of social interactions, and dysfunctional face processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder has been thought to be related to social dysfunction. In neuroscience literature, the hyperarousal of amygdala has been known to contribute to the impaired face processing in autistic individuals. However, studies have found that even though hyperarousal of amygdala is present in individuals with ASD, the magnitude of arousal does not exceed the maximum levels of people without ASD. The difference lies in the habituation response – people without ASD habituate rapidly to faces, whereas habituation amygdala arousal in people with ASD undergoes only a marginal decrease. This lack of habituation of amygdala neurons may explain the social dysfunction in the following way – because people with ASD do not habituate to face stimuli in a normal manner, they face difficulties in distinguishing the more salient stimuli from irrelevant ones, which in turn results in a stimulus overload. A study by Kleinhans et al 2009 found a strong correlation between social dysfunction and impairment of amygdala habituation. Another study looked at the responses of infants at high-risk and low-risk for autism to repeated auditory stimuli, and found that the former group showed less habituation. Thus, impairment of sensory habituation seems to be closely related to the dysfunctional social cognition in individuals with ASD. Ofcourse, when every face at all times looks like a new face, one may never develop the sense of familiarity and comfort that comes from being around known people. The world would feel so overwhelmingly strange if every sensory input felt new and unfamiliar. 

References:

Guiraud, J. A., Kushnerenko, E., Tomalski, P., Davies, K., Ribeiro, H., & Johnson, M. H. (2011). Differential habituation to repeated sounds in infants at high risk for autism. NeuroReport, 22(16), 845–849. https://doi.org/10.1097/wnr.0b013e32834c0bec 

Kleinhans, N. M., Johnson, L. C., Richards, T., Mahurin, R., Greenson, J., Dawson, G., & Aylward, E. (2009). Reduced Neural Habituation in the Amygdala and Social Impairments in Autism Spectrum Disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 166(4), 467–475. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07101681

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A Baby Face might just be your Get Out of Jail Free Card!

Have you ever looked at a bear in a zoo exhibit and felt the intense urge to pet a bear despite knowing that if you went anywhere near one, it could rip your head off? Neoteny refers to the retention of juvenile features into the adulthood of an animal. Adult animals with baby-like features, such as bears, pandas, or koalas, are the ones that attract the most visitors because of just how damn cute they are. 

Neotenic features in adult humans include a round face, big eyes, flat face, no hair, a small nose, and more. Neotenous adults are perceived to be younger, more innocent and naive, and studies have also found that they elicit more helpful behaviour from others. An interesting consequence of having a babyface that has been found in research, is that in criminal courts, jurors and judges perceive babyfaced defendants to be less guilty of intentional crimes. 

What could explain this? Modal action patterns are response sequences which are typical to a species. Several of these patterns have been identified in animal behaviour, such as courtship behaviour, territorial defense, aggressive behaviour, sexual behaviour, and also, parenting. Being protective of children from threats is a part of the modal action pattern that is parenting. The stimulus responsible for eliciting these behavioural patterns is termed as ‘sign stimulus’ or ‘release stimulus’. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz came up with a set of physical features which are typical of babies, called ‘baby schema’ – large eyes, small nose, round face, chubby cheeks etc. – which elicit parental behaviours such as caregiving, protection from danger, and nurturance. These features being the ‘releasing stimulus’ for parental behaviour explains why neotenous adults possessing these features may be perceived to be less guilty, because would you just look at that face…how could such a cute person possibly do anything wrong?

However, my baby faced readers, hold your horses and don’t just think you can get away with mischief so easily. The downside to this is that you will also be held to a higher standard. The studies about criminal courts also found that in the presence of incontrovertible evidence of a crime against defendants, baby faced individuals tend to face harsher punishments, because the jurors tend to feel betrayed. 

References: 

Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal stimuli : How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose. Norton. 

Domjan, M., & Grau, J. W. (2020). The principles of learning and behavior. Wadsworth.

Rilling, J. K. (2013). The neural and hormonal bases of human parental care. Neuropsychologia, 51(4), 731–747. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.12.017 

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Neural mechanisms behind habituation and sensitization: An exploration!This video lecture simplifies for your understanding the work of Kandel and colleagues in the 1970s, which looked into mechanisms of habituation and sensitization, forms of non-associative learning which have large implications for memory.

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