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Even babies can tell friend from foe.

Babies can infer whether other people are likely to be friends before they have language skills or much information about social structures. New infant cognition research reveals that nine-month-olds have the ability to discern friends from foes by looking at other people's likes and dislikes.

"This is some of the first evidence that young infants are tracking other people's social relationships," researcher Amanda L. Woodward, the William S. Gray Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, said in a news release.

The latest study involved 64 nine-month-old infants. The babies were divided into two groups. They were when shown videos of two adults. The adults each ate two foods and reacted in either a positive or a negative way to each food they ate.

"We depicted evaluations of food because food may provide particularly salient social information," co-researcher Katherine D. Kinzler, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago, said in a statement. "Eating with family and friends is inherently social, and so infants might be particularly inclined to use eating behaviors to make inferences about social relationships."

The study looked at how the infants responded to subsequent videos, which showed the same adults acting either positively or negatively toward each other. In the positive interaction video, adults greeted each other with smiles and said "Hi!" in a friendly tone of voice. In the negative interaction video, the adults turned away from each other, crossed their arms and said "Hmp" in an unfriendly tone of voice.

Researchers assessed the babies' reactions to the video by measuring the amount of time babies fixated at the screen.

Previous studies have shown that the duration of a baby's gaze shows how familiar or unexpected a situation seems. The longer the gaze, the more unexpected something is for babies because they take longer to make sense of it.

The findings revealed that babies fixated longer when adults who liked the same foods behaved negatively toward each other. They also fixated longer when adults who disagreed about the foods behaved like friends.

Researchers said the findings suggest that babies know that adults who agree with each other tend to act in a friendly way in other contexts. They explained that babies in the study predicted that adults who reacted similarly to foods were likely to be friends and were surprised when the videos depicted something different.

"This study raises questions on how babies think about who gets along and who doesn't," said lead author Zoe Liberman, a doctoral student in the University of Chicago Department of Psychology. "Parents will be interested to know that babies are keeping track of what's going on in the world around them and are making inferences about social interactions that we previously were not aware of before this study."

Researchers said the findings show for the fist time that the roots of a critical aspect of social cognition, reasoning about other people's social interactions based on likes and dislikes, can be traced to infancy.

The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.