11.2: Sensory Capacities

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the state of sensory development at birth.
2. Explain how newborns use sensory cues to interact with caregivers and their environment.
3. Identify milestones in visual and auditory development during the first six months of life.

Throughout much of history, the newborn was considered a passive, disorganized being who possessed minimal abilities. William James, an early psychologist, had described the newborn’s world as “a blooming, buzzing confusion” (Shaffer, 1985). However, current research techniques have demonstrated just how well-developed the newborn is, especially in terms of organized sensory and perceptual abilities.

Vision

The womb is a dark environment void of visual stimulation. Consequently, vision is the most poorly developed sense at birth, and time is needed to build those neural pathways between the eye and the brain. Newborns typically cannot see further than 8 to 16 inches away from their faces (which is about the distance from the newborn's face to the mother/caregiver when an infant is breastfeeding/bottle-feeding). Their visual acuity is about 20/400, which means that an infant can see something at 20 feet that an adult with normal vision could see at 400 feet. Thus, the world probably looks blurry to young infants. Due to their poor visual acuity, they look longer at checkerboards with fewer large squares than at those with many small squares. Infants' thresholds for perceiving a visual pattern are higher than those of adults. Thus, toys for infants are sometimes manufactured with black and white patterns rather than pastel colors because the higher contrast between black and white makes the pattern more visible to the immature visual system. By about 6 months, infants' visual acuity improves and approximates adult 20/25 acuity.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): An infant looking up at the person feeding them. Image by Ben_Kerckx on Pixabay.

When viewing a person’s face, newborns do not look at the eyes the way adults do; instead, they tend to look at the chin, a less detailed part of the face. However, by 2 or 3 months, they will seek more detail when exploring an object visually and begin showing preferences for unusual images over familiar ones, for patterns over solids, for faces over patterns, and for three-dimensional objects over flat images. Newborns have difficulty distinguishing between colors, but within a few months, they are able to discriminate between colors as well as adults do. Sensitivity to binocular depth cues, which require inputs from both eyes, is evident by about 3 months and continues to develop during the first 6 months. By 6 months, infants can also perceive depth perception in pictures (Sen, Yonas, & Knill, 2001). Infants who have experience crawling and exploring will pay greater attention to visual cues of depth and modify their actions accordingly (Berk, 2007).

Hearing

The infant’s sense of hearing is very keen at birth, and the ability to hear is evident as early as the 7th month of prenatal development. In fact, an infant can distinguish between very similar sounds as early as one month after birth and can distinguish between a familiar and unfamiliar voice even earlier. Infants are particularly sensitive to the frequencies of sounds in human speech and tend to prefer the exaggeration of infant-directed speech, which will be discussed later. Additionally, infants are innately ready to respond to the sounds of any language; however, some of this ability will be lost by 7 or 8 months as the infant becomes familiar with the sounds of a particular language and becomes less sensitive to sounds that are part of an unfamiliar language.

Newborns also prefer their mother’s voice over another female when speaking the same material (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980). Additionally, they will register in utero specific information heard from their mother’s voice. You may recall the Cat in the Hat study featured in the previous chapter, which illustrates this point.

Touch and Pain

Immediately after birth, a newborn is sensitive to touch and temperature, and is also highly sensitive to pain, responding with crying and cardiovascular responses (Balaban & Reisenauer, 2013). Newborns who are circumcised, which is the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis, without anesthesia experience pain as demonstrated by increased blood pressure, increased heart rate, decreased oxygen in the blood, and a surge of stress hormones (United States National Library of Medicine, 2016). Research has demonstrated that infants who were circumcised without anesthesia experienced more pain and fear during routine childhood vaccines. Fortunately, local painkillers are now used during many circumcisions.

Taste and Smell

Studies of taste and smell demonstrate that babies respond with different facial expressions, suggesting that certain preferences are innate. Newborns can distinguish between sour, bitter, sweet, and salty flavors and show a preference for sweet flavors. Newborns also prefer the smell of their mothers. An infant only 6 days old is significantly more likely to turn toward its own mother’s breast pad than to the breast pad of another baby’s mother (Porter, Makin, Davis, & Christensen, 1992), and within hours of birth, an infant also shows a preference for the face of its own mother (Bushnell, 2001; Bushnell, Sai, & Mullin, 1989).

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): The responses of infants to different tastes. Image by Alice Vilela and CC BY 4.0.

Infants seem to be born with the ability to perceive the world in an intermodal way; that is, through stimulation from more than one sensory modality. For example, infants who sucked on a pacifier with either a smooth or textured surface preferred to look at a corresponding (smooth or textured) visual model of the pacifier. By four months, infants can match lip movements with speech sounds and recognize other audiovisual events. Although sensory development emphasizes the afferent processes used to take in information from the environment, these sensory processes can be affected by the infant's developing motor abilities. Reaching, crawling, and other actions enable the infant to see, touch, and organize their experiences in new ways. ³⁰

References, Contributors and Attributions

30. Lifespan Development: A Psychological Perspective by Martha Lally and Suzanne Valentine-French is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Berk, L. E. (2007). Child development (8th ed.). Pearson.

Balaban, M. T., & Reisenauer, M. (2013). The impact of early pain experiences on neurodevelopmental outcomes. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 34(5), 361-369. https://doi.org/10.1097/DBP.0b013e3182a4c10b

Bushnell, I. W. R., Sai, F., & Mullin, J. (1989). Neonatal recognition of the mother’s face. The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 10(6), 202-206. https://doi.org/10.1097/00004703-198912000-00002

Bushnell, I. W. R. (2001). Mother’s face recognition in newborns. The Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, 22(2), 118-119.

DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P. (1980). Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers' voices. Science, 208(4448), 1174-1176. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7375938

Porter, R. H., Makin, J. W., Davis, R. H., & Christensen, T. J. (1992). The role of odor in the development of infant-mother recognition. Developmental Psychobiology, 25(6), 447-457. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.420250603

Sen, S., Yonas, A., & Knill, D. C. (2001). Depth perception in infancy: The role of texture and motion. Developmental Psychology, 37(1), 67-79. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.37.1.67

Shaffer, D. R. (1985). Developmental psychology: Childhood and adolescence. Brooks/Cole.

U.S. National Library of Medicine. (2016). Circumcision and pain management. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000971.htm