Many animals seem to tap into humans’ attraction to the adorable, a drive that also may motivate good parenting. Behavioral researchers have long noticed that humans seem to have inborn, positive responses to beings with characteristics typical of human infants—such as wide eyes, broad foreheads and large head-to-body ratios.
To better understand the responses that cuteness can elicit, psychologist Hiroshi Nittono and his colleagues at Hiroshima University in Japan published a series of experiments in 2012 in which college students, 132 in all, searched for a digit in numerical matrices or lifted tiny objects from small holes using tweezers. Afterward, participants viewed a series of photographs before attempting the attention or motor task for a second time.
Nittono and his colleagues found that students who viewed adult animals or food—stimuli they had rated as pleasant but not cute—did not improve between trials. But the students who saw cute baby animals did the tweezer task faster and more dexterously and performed the visual search task faster the second time, suggesting that being exposed to such creatures motivates focused, attentive behavior. This finding suggests that humans are primed to attend to fragile, young infants, who may require greater care than other beings. Clearly, baby animals exploit the same instinctive responses in us that human infants elicit.
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