Javier Elkin's Pocket Smile app

Some research for grown ups. Pocket Smile is part of my PhD project at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,

Dog and toddler with Down's syndrome make friends.

As I speculated in the previous post, most laughter is social and the reason that babies find dogs so funny

Context is everything

Your Babies #019: Babies think dogs are funnier than cats.

As the internet clearly shows, people think that cats are way funnier than dogs. But not if you are a

Experimenting With Babies: Baby science for you to try at home

Here's a new book, published today, that might interest readers of this blog: Experimenting With Babies: 50 Science

The physics of babies

As I've said before every baby is a scientist.  It might also be true that every scientist that

Your Babies #018: Caleb sharing a joke with mummy, daddy and an octopus

Here we see baby Caleb laughing as his mummy playfully attacks him with a funny blue octopus. Watch the film

Citizen Scientists Decode Meaning, Memory and Laughter - SciAm Mind

Scientific American Mind have a guest blog post from Joshua Hartshorne about citizen science. That is, science where researcher recruit

The power of play – Peter Gray

All young mammals spend most of their time playing. Evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray believes that this supports the clearly supports

Your Babies #017: Who's copying who?

For new parents and their babies, there is a wonderful moment when the baby realises he or she has the

Baby laughing in his sleep

It seems like it is so much fun being a baby that you will still be chuckling to yourself in

Your Babies #016: Tickle time

Q. Why do we laugh? A. Because we are happy.

That's shortest answer to the question why do we laugh? But what makes us happy? Ah, well now

What makes children laugh?

One of the nicest things about laughter is that it is contagious. Some colleagues at Kingston University are now interested

Your little monkeys are a bit like... little monkeys.

When I was born, I was quite furry with big sticky out ears. My mother thought I looked a bit

LEGO mini-figures are getting angrier

Christian Jarrett at the excellent BPS Research Digest reports on an ingenious but depressing study of the world's

Tiddles tickles tootsies

So far on this blog we've discussed whether babies could object to being tickled and wondered why cats

After the laughter..

As every parent knows all too well, it's not all fun and games having a baby or being

Your Babies #015: Which is the funniest animal?

Why are cats funnier than dogs? I don't know but the whole internet agrees that there simply no

Your Babies #014: Light goes on, light goes off

A little bit of causal hilarity from Rory and family. Babies need to spend a lot of time learning about

I wrote a novel.

It doesn't have any babies but it has a few jokes. In fact it's about a

Let's laugh at babies for a change..

On this blog we sometimes to forget that you can laugh at the babies as well as with them. via

Interview with Red Orbit magazine.

Back in November I did a short interview with popular science website Red Orbit. For some inexplicable reason, I forgot

Your Babies #013: Youngest ever fan of ripping paper

Lindsey sent me this remarkable video of her three month old son Dominic laughing at his daddy ripping paper. As