Big eyes, bigger heads and squishy little noses. The physical characteristics that make babies so squeezable are called the Kindchenschema, and they keep parents all over the animal kingdom from leaving stinky infants to their own devices. But research suggests that this cuteness does more than just tell your lizard brain that the squirming screamer in your arms is important. "Cute" could actually be a complex, multi-sensory attack that babies have evolved to hijack your brain.
Cute is a long-standing interest of Morten Kringelbach of Oxford University. Several years ago, he found that folks presented with images of babies had activity spikes in regions of the brain associated with emotion and pleasure within just a few milliseconds - right around the time the information reached visual centres.
The results astounded him. It's well accepted that babies are designed to grab attention - an evolutionary development that keeps our harmless young from dying out and driving our species to extinction - but he expected signs of this to pop up a step or two after the baby was recognised by the conscious brain. "Almost before you're consciously aware that you're looking at anything at all, you cannot help but feel compelled by that baby," he said.And this cuteness short circuit was disturbingly fickle: When he repeated the experiment with images of children with minor facial deformities such as a cleft lip, the reaction slowed. That made him think about all the ways this caregiving urge can fail to emerge, and he wondered whether a better understanding of the cognitive processes behind cute might help parents in trouble.
On Monday, Kringelbach and his colleagues published a review of all the latest literature on this weird cute phenomenon, including much of their own work. They argue that the traits that make up the Kindchenschema are far more complex (and insidious) than we usually give them credit for. "There's something privileged about the way babies get into the brain," he said. "It's like they have privileged access."
For starters, it works on everyone, not just parents (and not just women). And it's not just about visuals. "Crying isn't seen as cute," Kringelbach said, "but it uses these same mechanisms." A crying baby gets into your head, no matter whom the child belongs to. That screaming newborn on an airplane isn't annoying because she's loud, but because your brain won't let you focus on anything else while she's wailing for attention (and maybe also because she's loud).
Although work on olfactory factors is still in its infancy - it's hard to do the requisite brain scan, because "you just can't bottle that baby smell" - preliminary evidence suggests it plays a role as well. Touch is similarly hard to study in a brain scanner, he added, but let's be real: Baby humans are basically warm cuddle nuggets covered in peach-soft skin, and you don't stand a chance.
