Babies Know Living Things Have Guts, Strange Psychology Study Shows

Despite never having performed surgery or dissected an animal, 8-month-old babies expect living creatures to have insides, new research suggests.

The study, detailed Sept. 3 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that tots expected self-propelled objects to have guts and were surprised when those objects were hollow.

The results suggest babies have an innate ability to understand the basic biology of animals.

"Young children expect animals to have different insides from inanimate objects, and they realize that an animal's insides are important for its survival," study co-author Peipei Setoh, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement. "They know that if you remove the insides, the animal can't function." [11 Surprising Facts About a Baby's Brain]

Built-in awareness

Babies may look like blank slates, but a lot is going on behind those chubby cheeks and wide eyes. Some studies suggest babies have moral compasses, and other research has found that infants have an intuitive grasp of physics and even statistics.

For instance, when they see objects moving by themselves, babies assume those objects must have internal energy. And when they see objects that seem to respond to environmental changes, they think those objects must have mental awareness.

But whether they had a similar sense about biology wasn't clear.

Animals have guts

So Setoh and her colleagues showed a variety of toys to babies as young as 8 months. Some of the objects were both self-propelled and able to respond to their environment (a sign that they had mental states). Other objects had just one of those traits, and still other toys were completely immobile.

Then, the team opened up the objects, revealing hollow insides.

The babies looked longer at the toys that moved on their own and responded to environmental cues. That suggested the youngsters viewed these objects like animals with guts and were surprised by their empty insides.

In a second experiment, the team showed furry objects to tots, before revealing the furballs were hollow. Because even young babies know that animals have fur, the tots once again looked longer at their hollow insides than at the non-furry objects that were hollow, suggesting their expectations were confounded.

The findings suggest infants have awareness of how animals operate.

"When babies encounter a novel object that is both self-propelled and agentive, they categorize it as an animal, and they assume it has insides,” study co-author Renée Baillargeon, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said in a statement.

It's not clear why babies come wired with a built-in biological intuition, but one possibility is that it helped them identify prey or flee from dangerous predators in our evolutionary past, the researchers note.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

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Animal Inside Out exhibition is an anatomical safari under the skin of some of nature's most impressive creatures.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
During the plastination process coloured liquid resin is injected in the main arterial network. When the surrounding tissue is removed a perfect highway of vessels is revealed.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
All the animals in the exhibition have been plastinated by the Body Worlds team. Gunther von Hagens invented the process at Heidelberg University in 1977. There are, however, always new challenges such as plastinating this powerful bull, which can weigh up to 1,200 kilograms.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
A colossal network of blood vessels exists inside animal bodies. The arteries in this rabbit help deliver blood from the heart, repeatedly branching into smaller and smaller vessels to reach every extremity until they become hair-like capillaries.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
A tiny shrew lives for just a few years. Its heart races at 1,000 beats a minute while it is alive, while the slow- beating heart of an elephant can beat for up to 70 years.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
The towering giraffe has an exceptionally long neck, but the same number of cervical vertebrae as a human: seven. Each is just much longer, helping to make the giraffe the tallest living land mammal.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
Primates are the nearest mirror we have in the animal world, key similarities and differences can be observed morphology.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
This blood vessel model of a horse's head shows the complex network of arteries and capillaries that help deliver oxygen and energy to the surrounding tissue. © Gunther von Hagens_Institute for Plastination,

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
A rabbit's skeleton is adapted to jumping. The bones are fine and the spine flexible, enabling rabbits to leap powerfully.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
A reindeer's body shape not only helps them cope with the harsh arctic conditions, they have also evolved to survive attacks from predators. The muscles that power the legs are mounted close to the trunk, keeping the end of the legs nice and light.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
Sheep and goats may look completely different on the surface but under the skin the internal structures of their organs, muscles and bones are very similar.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
This specimen demonstrates that sharks have two kinds of muscle. Red muscle for endured activity and white muscle for short bursts of energy.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
Goats' bodies are designed to cope with the uneven and rocky terrain that they often inhabit.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
The ostrich is a bird that's too heavy to fly. An adult can weigh up to 160 kilogrammes - about twice the weight of a large man.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany
Despite being a bird, an ostrich's body shape reflects its ability to run as fast as 50km an hour, instead of its ability (or lack of ability) to fly.

© Gunther von Hagens, Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany

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