A press release was held for research results relating to the Center for Research and Development Initiatives Practical Research Project Investigating Social Perception and Physical Perception (research representative: Faculty of Letters Professor Masami Yamaguchi).

[Outline]
Children seem to like shiny things. They like gold and silver origami paper. Among boys and girls toys we can see some with parts that have a metallic shine or sparkling lame. From what age did they begin to notice and like these gold things? Gold can be made by adding glossiness to yellow. In our experiment we showed green and yellow, which had the same preference, and then added glossiness. We investigated their preferences when glossiness was added to yellow to make it gold.

Through results from the experiment we found that 1) 7-8 month old babies expressed a liking for gold, and 2) 7-8 month old babies possibly have the same perception of gold as adults.

These results came from a joint research by the Faculty of Letters and the Center for Research and Development Initiatives, Chuo University (Professor Masami Yamaguchi, Institute Assistant Professor Yang Jiale), and the Faculty of Integrated Arts and Social Sciences, Japan Women’s University (Professor So Kanazawa), and were published in the June 27th issue of PLOS ONE.

Please visit the following links for further information.

• Link: Press release Babies love gold! – World’s first evidence that babies have a preference for gold
• Link: Press release materials (pdf 308kb)
• Link: Psychology: Masami K. Yamaguchi Laboratory