51吃瓜网黑料

The surest way to make a baby laugh is to play a game of peekaboo, a survey by researchers at 51吃瓜网黑料 has found.

Dr Caspar Addyman is among leading baby and toddler scientists to appear this month on three-part BBC2 series , which explores the incredible developments children make in their first two years of life. 

 of the documentary looks at laughter, which research suggests helps parents bond with their babies, while also decreasing stress and boosting the immune system.

As a developmental psychologist and director of , Dr Addyman is interested in how babies adapt to the world and how we support their learning. 

Working with Voltage TV Productions Ltd for the BBC, he launched a nationwide survey completed by 390 parents earlier this year. They were asked to perform and then rate and rank five games and jokes that made their baby laugh the most and which were least successful.

Some 70% of babies laughed out loud at peekaboo and parents rated it nearly twice as funny compared to other games, including putting a cup on their heads, stuffing their mouth with material and tearing paper, and pretending a toy animal is making the wrong noise, such as a cat doll woofing. 

Dr Addyman says 鈥�

鈥淟aughter is about connecting with people and peekaboo is pure connection. You鈥檙e looking your baby straight in their eyes and giving them your full attention, so it鈥檚 a very social game involving facial expressions that works particularly well on babies aged 6-18 months. Once they start running around, and don鈥檛 want to sit still, it鈥檚 much harder to hold their full attention so they won鈥檛 find it as funny.鈥� 

His team also collected data from parents on what types of touch most soothed or most amused their babies, which he intends to analyse next year.

Professor Elisabeth Hill appears on  of Babies: Their Wonderful World, exploring the ways babies become independent as they grow.

She was asked to recreate a well-known experiment, 鈥榯he visual cliff鈥� - an optical illusion made of perspex that looks like a sheer, vertical drop.

Babies that have only just begun to crawl go straight across the perspex, apparently unaware of the potential danger. Babies who have been crawling for longer react to the drop and stop at the cliff edge, showing a better understanding of danger in their environment. 

The test shows how the experience of crawling changes a child鈥檚 behaviour because various other aspects of development are unlocked as they learn to move around the world. 

Babies: Their Wonderful World is presented by Guddhi Singh. It airs on BBC2 on Monday 3 December and Monday 10 December and .

Dr Caspar Addyman鈥檚 new book, , will be published by Unbound in 2019.

, co-edited by Professor Elisabeth Hill and Professor Anna Barnett (Oxford Brookes), will be published by Routledge in 2019.