Hacking my baby

Finnish maternetity clinics gives these smiley face posters to every family. The idea is to put the poster next to the baby threatment table, so the baby would focus to the smiley face and relax.

I was wondering why the smiley face is so good, so I draw my own and made some experiments

The experiment

I swapped colors to something else than yellow and red. I had all kinds of nice pastel colors which would calm an adult. I also tested black and white, which was not as good as the original yellow and red.

Here’s some colors that I tried.

Results

I’m pretty sure that there’s a lot of research about what babies really can see. I have heard that babies should see in black & white. In my experience this is probably not true. I changed colors and they made a clear impact on my baby. The pastels did not work at all. It seems to me that the baby can not even see the picture. I guess that there’s a reason why prime colors are so dominant in toys made for little babies.

Bright yellow and red were really good colors. In my case the baby only liked an image if it had either yellow or red on it. Hard to tell which one was more important. It feels safe to say that having both yellow and red in same image can’t be bad.

Do you want to try it? You can donwload smiley_face.pdf