Perceptual capacities

The rearward regions of the developing brain, which control sensory information, grow
rapidly during the first few months of life, enabling newborn infants to make fairly good
sense of what they touch, see, smell, taste, and hear (Gilmore et al., 2007).
Touch and Pain
• Touch is the first sense to develop, and for the first several months it is the most
mature sensory system.
• When a newborn’s cheek is stroked near the mouth, the baby responds by trying to
find a nipple : rooting reflex.
• Early signs of this rooting reflex appear in the womb, two months after
conception.
• By 32 weeks of gestation, all body parts are sensitive to touch.
• In the past, physicians performing surgery (such as circumcision) on newborn
babies often used no anesthesia because of a mistaken belief that neonates cannot
feel pain or feel it only briefly.
• evidence that the capacity for pain perception may emerge by the third trimester
of pregnancy .
• Newborns can and do feel pain; and they become more sensitive to it during the
next few days. now maintain that prolonged or severe pain can do long-term harm
to newborns and that pain relief during surgery is essential.
Smell and Taste
• The senses of smell and taste also begin to develop in the womb.
• The flavors and odors of foods an expectant mother consumes may be transmitted
to the fetus through the amniotic fluid.
• After birth, a similar transmission occurs through breast milk.
• A preference for pleasant odors seems to be learned in utero and during the first
few days after birth, and the odors transmitted through the mother’s breast milk
may further contribute to this learning.
• This attraction to the fragrance of the mother’s milk may be another evolutionary
survival mechanism.
• Certain taste preferences seem to be largely innate.
• Newborns prefer sweet tastes to sour, bitter, or salty tastes
• Sweetened water calms crying newborns, whether full term or two to three weeks
premature—evidence that not only the taste buds themselves (which seem to be
fairly well developed by 20 weeks of gestation),
• An inborn sweet tooth may help a baby adapt to life outside the womb, as breast
milk is quite sweet .
• Newborns’ rejection of bitter tastes is probably another survival mechanism, as
many bitter substances are toxic.
Hearing
• functional before birth.
• fetuses respond to sounds and seem to learn to recognize them
• . From an evolutionary perspective, early recognition of voices and language
heard in the womb may lay the foundation for the relationship with the
mother, which is critical to early survival.
• Auditory discrimination develops rapidly after birth.
• Three-day-old infants can tell new speech sounds from those they have heard
before.
• At 1 month, babies can distinguish sounds as close as ba and pa.
• Because hearing is a key to language development, hearing impairments
should be identified as early as possible.
Sight
• Vision is the least developed sense at birth, perhaps because there is so
little to see in the womb.
• Visual perception and the ability to use visual information—identifying
caregivers, finding food, and avoiding dangers—become more important
as infants become more alert and active.
• The eyes of newborns are smaller than those of adults.
• the retinal structures are incomplete and the optic nerve is
underdeveloped.
• A neonate’s eyes focus best from about 1 foot away—just about the
typical distance from the face of a person holding a newborn. This
focusing distance may have evolved to promote mother-infant bonding.
• There is some evidence that the ability to recognize faces—specifically, a
caregiver’s face—may be an innate survival mechanism
• Newborns blink at bright lights.
• Their field of peripheral vision is very narrow; it more than doubles
between 2 and 10 weeks and is well developed by 3 months
• The ability to follow a moving target also develops rapidly in the first
months, as does color perception.
• Four-month-old babies can discriminate among red, green, blue, and
yellow .
• Visual acuity at birth is approximately 20/400 but improves rapidly,
reaching the 20/20 level by about 8 months. (This measure of vision
means that a person can read letters on a specified line on a standard eye
chart from 20 feet away.)
• Binocular vision —the use of both eyes to focus, enabling perception of
depth and distance—usually does not develop until 4 or 5 months.