- Babies are born with basic sensory abilities that develop rapidly in the first months of life, including vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. - By 2 months, babies can see in color and focus at varying distances, their peripheral vision has more than doubled from birth, and they can discern differences in sounds as subtle as "bah" vs. "pah" through habituation experiments. - Babies show preferences for visual stimuli like faces and complex patterns from an early age, and can recognize and orient towards their mother's unique scent within their first weeks.

1. SENSORY DEVELOPMENT

2. Sensory Development Can see and hear Follow moving objects with eyes 10% of time ‘quietly alert’ – scanning for interesting stimuli Can feel pain, detect mother’s odour, show taste and flavour preferences

4. Visual Perceptual Abilities Born with ability to perceive movement and some degree of depth Visual cliff experiment (Gibson and Walk, 1960) By 2 months, discern colour and brightness 4 months – 35% scanning time and ability to focus at varying distances is almost as good as adults Narrow peripheral vision at birth – more than doubles between 2 and 10 weeks of age

5. Habituation Hearing abilities often studied through habituation Baby becomes used to a stimulus and stops responding to it. When a new stimulus is presented, the response (e.g. sucking on comforter) resumes, indicating difference As early as 3 days

6. Preference Amount of time looking at different sights tell us about visual preferences 4 months, show a preference for red and blue Babies prefer curved lines to straight, complex patterns to simple, three dimensional to two dimensional objects, pictures of faces to pictures of other things, new sights to familiar ones.

7. Face recognition Maurer and Salapatek (1976) – 1 and 2 month babies shown three expressionless faces: their mother’s, a strange woman’s and a strange man’s. 1 month tended to look away, particularly from faces of their mother. Eyes focused on borders of the faces – recognition based on chin or hairline distinctiveness.

8. Auditory Better developed than visual Inner and middle ears reach nearly adult size and shape in the womb Startled by loud noises Turn in direction of sounds Can distinguish between varying lengths and intensity By 3 days, recognises difference between mother’s voice and other women

9. Discriminative sucking 1 month old discriminates between two sounds as close as ‘bah’ and ‘pah’ (1971) Special nipples, when sucked, turn on recording. At first, vigorous sucking for ‘bah’. Then slowed down. When ‘pah’ replaced ‘bah’, strong sucking returned. Mother’s voice – recording of storytelling 24% more sucking when it was the mother’s voice.

10. Taste Can discriminate between different tastes Rejects bad-tasting food Prefer sweet tastes to sour or bitter ones Sweeter the fluid, the harder they suck and more they drink. By four months, most favour salty over sweet tastes Useful to parents and medical practitioners – add salt

11. Smell One of the most highly developed in newborns Preferences show within first weeks, including a preference for the odour of breast milk Helps recognise mother – mother and other women wore pads close to their breast. The two pads were then placed either side of an infant’s head. Even 2 wk infants were more likely to orient to the pad with their mother’s unique scent.

12. TOUCH Touching increases positive emotions and causes babies to gaze and smile at adult carers Haptic perception – children use touch to explore and discover sensory qualities of objects. First few months, oral exploration Manual manipulation - newborn infants wooden cylinder/prism experiment show discrimination