Humour helps toddlers learn

Parents, take note! If your toddler is refusing to learn a new task, try making them laugh!

Using humour can help toddlers learn new tasks, a team of French scientists has discovered.

Building on the knowledge that making older children laugh can enhance many aspects of cognition, researchers designed an experiment to see whether using humour could also have an effect on the ability of infants to learn.

Each of the 18-month-olds selected to participate in the final part of the study observed an adult using a tool to grab an out-of-reach toy.

In one group the adult simply played with the toy after retrieving it; but in the other group, the adult threw the toy immediately on the floor, which made half the children in that group laugh.

When researchers studied their data, they found that the children who laughed at the antics of the adults were able to repeat the action themselves more successfully than those who didn't laugh, as well as those who were included in the 'humourless' control group.

Why laughter seems to be related to the toddlers' ability to learn isn't entirely clear, but researchers put forward two possible explanations. The first relates to temperament.

"In this case, it is not humour per se that may have facilitated learning," the researchers suggest, "but [that] temperamentally 'smiley' babies were more likely to engage with the environment and therefore to attempt and succeed at the task."

It could also be the case that 'laughing babies' might have higher social skills or cognitive capacities, allowing them to interact more easily with others and making them more amenable to mimicking the actions of others.

The second explanation the researchers put forward relates to brain chemistry. It is well known that positive emotions, like laughter or engaging well with an experimenter, can increase dopamine levels in the brain, which in turn has a positive effect on learning.

"Thus, the effect observed here might be a general effect due to positive emotion and not to humour or laughter per se," researchers said.

The study is published in the journal Cognition and Emotion.