**5. The relevance of embodied cognition to the study of toddlers**

Levels of language development are of course the central issue in trying to study toddlers, if we are trying to gather evidence about their responses and thoughts in relation to movies. But even when toddlers can speak fairly fluently, their ideas and thought processes can still be hard to follow, even if we know them well. What we can also do however is observe their whole-body responses: posture, gesture, facial expressions, eye direction and movement. Although these are mainly instinctive, and can be fleeting, the developing field of embodied cognition theory has much to offer here.

In the Cartesian tradition which dominates popular beliefs about the separation of mind and body, and distinguishes between rational thought and instinctive behaviour, it is seen as important to control our emotions and beware of acting instinctively. Referring to instincts as "primitive" sounds derogatory, but as the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp explains, the neural structures that govern important instinctive behaviour such as avoiding predators and spotting something edible were present in very early life-forms and many are shared today by all mammals [38]. So metaphoric devices in movies such as the point-of-view shot and the cut to close-up mimic skills that were obviously vital for survival in dangerous environments millions of years ago, and the fact that we all retain them today shows that we still need them. Using an evolutionary perspective to study toddlers' instinctive behaviour can therefore be illuminating: what may often be interpreted as idiosyncratic or inexplicable actions can turn out to be potentially meaningful after all.

Although we differ genetically from chimpanzees by only 1.06% or less of our DNA [39], human babies take much longer than chimpanzee babies to become mobile and dextrous and to be able to eat food other than their mothers' milk. But our big brains and hence our capacity for storing and analysing information, as well as the complex cultures we are all born into mean that, despite being physically almost helpless, human infants must begin social learning from the moment they are born. They communicate emotionally in enjoyable, intersubjective exchanges with their carers: "From birth, a child's learning depends upon sharing his or her impulsive acting and thinking with other familiar persons, who themselves are experimenters, discoverers, and communicators, eager to share what they think and do" [40]. This forms the foundation for their later learning, as they become mobile and begin to be fluent in verbal language at around 12–18 months old. And if they have access to books, pictures, games and movies, this is when their interest in the meaning-potential of these media starts to grow exponentially. Thus, the second and third years of life are a phenomenally important period in which a great deal of our emotional, social and cultural learning starts to be established. In these three areas, we have to be cautious about the extent to which we can ever hope to gather hard evidence about what has been learned. What we can do however is establish that a child is learning and is investing an extraordinary amount of energy in the process. This should have a significant effect on the judgements we make about the value of toddlers' movie-watching.

## **6. Evidence of learning (1): focused attention**

Panksepp describes four emotions that he says are likely to have arisen from basic environmental challenges: fear, panic, rage and seeking, each of which triggers immediate, instinctive actions. They remain deeply embedded in the ancient circuits of our brains because they have continued to be of survival value over millions of years, as humans evolved from earlier mammalian species. The only one of these four emotions whose meaning may not be immediately obvious is "seeking". Panksepp uses this term to describe feelings of engagement and excitement: feelings that generate curiosity, anticipation and investigation. So not only would seeking get early humans (and their evolutionary predecessors) doing things like foraging and finding shelter, but it has always also been essential to logical thought and reflection: it "helps cement the perception of causal connections in the world and thereby creates ideas" ([38], pp. 144–149). In other words, it has been perhaps the most important emotion for us because it has driven human ingenuity and development (for both good and ill). So if we bear this in mind when we see a two-year-old intently gazing at a screen, rather than simply dismissing her behaviour as "mesmerised" or "zombie-like", it makes better sense to interpret it instead as seeking: as an intense process of trying to make sense of what she is watching.

But "seeking" on its own does not tell us enough about what the attentive child is really after. Here Lesley Lancaster's remarkable study of a two-year-old engaged, with her father, in making drawings and marks, may be helpful. Lancaster observes "physical and bodily actions [as] visible indicators of the course of abstract reasoning used whilst engaging with the difficult business of finding out about how a system of symbolic representation works" ([41], p. 132). She describes all of the child's efforts to understand what her father is doing and to make her own meaningful marks on the page, as "characterized by an expectation of significance about the semiotic objects encountered. Children are introduced to them, one way or another, as having a social or affective purpose: the cartoon makes you laugh; the soft toy comforts; writing can entertain and inform" (p. 136). I find the phrase "expectation of significance" highly illuminating in the context of trying to understand what two-year-olds are up to when they clearly seem to be "seeking".

The situation Lancaster describes and the viewing contexts that many toddlers experience is a social one. With toddlers' acute awareness of what others are doing and what their emotional states are, most of them are familiar with occasions when other family members are not only intently watching a film, video or TV programme on a shared screen, but are also exhibiting emotional responses such as laughter, suspense, shock, disgust or surprise, and exchanging comments about what they are watching (readers who only ever watch movies in respectful silence can find exaggerated versions of this behaviour in the British TV show *Gogglebox:*

#### *Toddlers and Movies: A Fresh Approach DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100259*

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gogglebox/). At minimum then, toddlers who have experienced this will have expectations of significance when they watch any movie. Just as toddlers who are read to will quickly adapt to the conventions of reading, such as sitting still, waiting for page-turns, examining the pictures, etc., they will also quickly become eager to discover and share what is pleasurable and interesting about watching movies.

For a toddler, this is also hard physical work. If he wants to maintain an absolutely steady gaze at something that is not actually in his hands (a big flat-screen television for example) he may well have to brace himself against a nearby object such as a piece of furniture. Studies of human movement and balance point out that a toddler's centre of gravity is higher than that of older children and adults [42] and that in any case, most people can never maintain total stillness for very long [43]. So toddlers have to find ways of supporting themselves if they want to maintain steady visual contact, especially with a large area of moving images. Thus, bracing is often just an essential response for keeping the body stable. From other observations, I noted that if there is not a handy support, the child may stiffen his body and perhaps hunch his shoulders in the effort to maintain a steady position and may even have to pause now and then for a couple of seconds' relaxation before resuming the rigid pose. An adult with an attentive toddler on their lap will be able to feel the child's bodily tension and perhaps his grip on their limb or clothing as he maintains his gaze. If the child is also apprehensive about what he is looking at, the grip is likely to be tighter. Of course, if a child is sitting down watching a movie on a tablet or smartphone, keeping still is not such a problem, although the images are less overwhelming and satisfying.

It is also interesting to observe what a toddler does with her hands, if they are not already in use as part of the "braced" posture. It is likely that wherever the hands were before her attention was focused, they will remain in that position – so continuing to grip a bottle, cup or toy for example, or perhaps simply remaining placed on a nearby piece of furniture. There are parallels here with the way in which a predator such as a cat will instinctively "freeze" when it spots a movement that could be potential prey: if the cat is walking when this happens, one paw may remain raised so that no movement takes place that might alert the prey. A toddler suddenly enthralled by something in a movie will "freeze" in the same way.

The other obvious physical features of focused attention are facial expressions. These can be extremely fleeting, and in the case of toddlers with their relatively plump faces, it can be difficult to spot some expressions such as a frown. The major facial characteristic of more relaxed but still focused attentiveness in toddlers is commonly an open mouth, often accompanied by the typical toddler runny nose. Watching attentively for several minutes with one's mouth open leads to dry lips, so lip-licking will happen regularly, and perhaps also some hasty nose-wipes with a handy sleeve. If a child is watching something attentively while drinking from a bottle or feeder cup, she may have to hold it to one side in order to maintain a gaze on the screen. Highly focused attention – in watching something suspenseful, for example – may be accompanied by deeper breathing – indicated by chest movements. Spotting the tiny rim of tears around a child's eyelids when she is moved by something sad in a movie, is difficult in a live situation but can be spotted in video analysis.

It is when one realises how much energy has to be committed to maintaining this level of attention for any length of time, that it becomes apparent how completely inappropriate terms such as "passive" and mesmerised" are as characterisations of children's focused attention on a movie. For an adult, standing rigidly still, holding tightly to a piece of furniture, frowning, breathing deeply and gazing openmouthed and fixedly at something for a few minutes will convey some idea of how

much physical energy a toddler can invest in maintaining focused attention. For a toddler, any learning is a very serious business, and the world is full of new things to discover and understand. Additionally, my earlier parallel with a cat's hunting pose indicates that this kind of attentiveness has deep evolutionary roots. The early humans who survived their dangerous environments no doubt did so because they were as good as their non-human ancestors at concentrating very hard, quickly identifying and assessing potential threats or opportunities, and reacting appropriately. They must also have been good at working out solutions to practical problems or intellectual challenges and enjoying the satisfaction of having done so. While it is very often difficult to identify exactly what has caught a toddler's attention in a movie, it has to be recognised that toddlers must have a strong motivation to invest so much energy.

## **7. Evidence of learning (2): emotional responses**

Young children can easily be frightened by unexpected things that they do not understand, and this can include things that to a more experienced viewer are completely innocuous. A Google search for "my toddler is scared of TV" on 5th August 2021 yielded "about 8,240,000 results", including numerous instructions to parents about the dangers of watching TV. Discussions on parents' social media sometimes address similar issues, but are more likely to include reassuring advice such as "don't worry, it'll pass". My own interest in studying toddlers' movie-watching behaviour was sparked off by an event in which my 13-month-old twin grandchildren were suddenly terrified by what is clearly meant to be a light-hearted part of an episode of the BBC TV series *In the Night Garden*, in which a puppet character's big black moustache suddenly detaches itself from his face and flies around like a moth. What interested me was that they had seen this episode several times already. So although their ability to follow and interpret the episode must have been growing as they re-viewed it, their generic knowledge had not yet developed enough to be always capable of recognising humorous intent. In fact they did not spontaneously laugh at a visual gag in a movie (the "Water" episode of *Teletubbies* Season 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies) until they were 27 months old. Being able to do this involves memory – to hold in mind the sequence of events that leads to the gag, and perhaps also the typical behaviour of a character – and the generic or social knowledge that enables us to anticipate humour as well as to appreciate inappropriateness.

The common-sense parental view, that this is just a phase and will not result in long-term trauma, is probably well-founded, but it makes better sense still if we see it as part of a learning process. Most of us can be frightened, if only momentarily, by sudden and apparently inexplicable phenomena, but we can quickly be reassured if we can draw on our life-experiences to figure out what has happened or talk about it with others. Toddlers have less experience and more limited language skills than pre-schoolers, so their fear responses are magnified by the impossibility of sharing them. It usually does not help much if adults show alarm as well, and it can magnify the distress if co-viewers stop the movie as soon as a toddler expresses fear: watching it through to the end can often help a toddler understand what the point of the frightening bit actually was.

Another perspective on toddlers' "inexplicable fears" is provided by Paul Kagan, who describes how 18–24-month-olds can often be distressed by what they see as violations of states of affairs "which adults have indicated are proper". His examples include broken toys, damaged or dirty clothing and things missing from their usual places ([44], Chapter 5). He links this to their interest in categorising

#### *Toddlers and Movies: A Fresh Approach DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.100259*

objects into groups sharing physical or functional similarities (p 88). So a toddler seeing something strange in a movie may be frightened rather than amused, because he sees it as "something that's not supposed to happen". An example of this from my research was when Connie (one of the twins, then aged 24 months) watched the *Peppa Pig* "Sports Day" episode (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AJdE21yxwxw) and burst into a storm of tears when the girls-versusboys tug-of-war contest ended suddenly because the rope broke. In this case it is likely that Connie had invested her narrative expectations in the girls winning the contest: Peppa had failed to win anything so far because she had (typically) wasted time chatting to Daddy Pig. However, in this case there was an interesting sequel. Connie deliberately continued to re-view the episode whenever she could, until – three months later – she had found a way to cope with the breaking rope merely by sighing sadly. This could be seen as an example of self-directed learning, which I discuss in Section 8, below.

Toddlers' responses to sad events or sad characters in movies are different from their fears, because they are already well-attuned to interpreting emotional states in others [45]. They may therefore find it too difficult to watch something sad but find it difficult to explain why. When the twins saw the main character crying in *Baboon on the Moon* (https://vimeo.com/58445945)*,* which they watched at 30 months old, they devised a strategy for dealing with it. Because the sound of snoring can be heard when the movie begins, both children expected to see their mother (Phoebe) appear (because she is famous in the family for snoring). Although Phoebe obviously never does appear in the movie, they both seemed to have convinced themselves that she was there somewhere. She had not watched the movie with them, but came into the room at the end and asked what had happened, seeing that Connie looked sad. Connie rushed into her arms for comfort and then said hesitantly "he … cried" but refused to say more when asked why. She changed the subject, saying very brightly instead "YOU were there, Mummy!" Alfie managed a second viewing, but when asked what he thought of the movie simply said "I liked Mummy!" So in spite of clear evidence to the contrary, both used the "mummy snoring" concept as a way of deflecting their distress about the Baboon's sadness as he gazes tearfully at the faraway Earth from his lonely home on the Moon. This enabled them to resist giving way to tears, although the fact that they were both on the verge of it could be seen in video analysis from the tiny rim of tears on their eyelids and their pursed lips.
