Newborn infants have well-developed senses at birth. They can hear as well as adults with head colds, and can discriminate sounds by loudness, duration, direction, and frequency within hours of birth. By 4-6 months, infants can react to rapidly approaching sounds similarly to visual stimuli. Infants are also attentive to voices, especially mothers, and responsive to language from a young age. Touch promotes development, while temperature, pain, and unpleasant smells elicit distress. Vision is the least mature sense initially but develops rapidly in the first year. By integrating senses like touch, sight, sound, infants gain true intermodal perception to understand their environment.

1. HEARING
• In the 1st few hours of life, infants hear as well as an adult
with a head cold.
• Capable of discriminating sounds that differ in
loudness, duration, direction, & frequency.
• At 4-6 months, react to a rapidly approaching auditory
stimulus in the same way as a visual stimulus. Ex: Blink in
anticipation of a collision
• Attentive to voices, especially high-pitched female voices.
• Responsiveness to mother’s voice encourages healthy
social, emotional, and intellectual development.

2. • Phonemes-Smallest meaningful sound units that make up a spoken
language.
• Peter Eimas-Research of 2-3 month olds showed they could
distinguish consonant sounds that are very familiar, such as ba and
pa.
• Infants less than a week old distinguish difference between vowels
A and I.
• By 4-1/2 months, recognition of common words, such as their own
name.
• By 7-1/2 months, ability to generalize language-learned patterns to
other tones, instrument timbres, and animal sounds.
• Otitis media- Common bacterial infection of the middle ear that
produces mild to moderate hearing loss.
-Can cause language development, academic, & social delays.
• Sensitive to language properties even when the language is signed
rather than spoken.

3. TASTE
• Infants prefer sweets
• Suck faster for sweet liquids than
sour, bitter, salty or natural solutions.
• Sweets produce smacking of lips and smiles
• Sour produces wrinkled nose and pursed lips
• Bitter produces expressions of disgust:
downturned mouth, tongue protrusions, and
spitting.

4. SMELL
• Infants are capable of detecting a variety of odors.
• Turn away and express disgust to unpleasant odors
Ex: Vinegar, ammonia, & rotten eggs
• 4 days old-Prefer the odor of milk to amniotic fluid
• 1-2 weeks – Breast-fed infants already recognize
their mothers by the smell of her breasts and
underarms and can discriminate between other
women.

5. TOUCH
• Touch and close contact promote developmental progress in
all infants.
• Lowers stress levels, calms, and promotes neural activity.
• Therapeutic effect: Gentle stroking and massaging arouses
inattentive infants and calms agitated ones. Causes smiling
and bonding with their companions.
• Within 1st year babies explore their environment.
-First with their lips and mouths
-Later with hands
-Contributes largely to their early cognitive development

6. TEMPERATURE & PAIN
• Infants are sensitive to warmth, cold, and changes in
temperature.
-Refuse to suck milk if it is too hot.
-Become more active to maintain body heat if the
temperature drops in the room.
• 1 day old infants cry loudly & show greater distress when
receiving inoculations than 5-11 month- olds.
• Males are highly stressed by circumcision
-Done without anesthesia , pain-killing drugs risky to give
to infants.
-High-pitched cries during surgery similar to premature
and brain damaged infants.

7. VISION
• The least mature of a newborn’s senses
• Infants more likely to track faces than other patterns.
• Neonates have trouble discriminating blues, greens, and
yellows from whites.
• By 2-3 months, can discriminate all the basic colors.
• By 4 months, they can group shades of colors into the same
basic categories that adults do.
• Visual acuity-A person’s ability to see small objects in fine
detail.
• Visual contrasts-The amount of light/dark transition in a visual
stimulus.

8. • Neonates distance vision is about 20/600, which
means they see at 20 feet what adults with good
vision can see at 600 feet.
• The inability to change the shape of the lens of the
eye to bring objects into focus makes anything at a
distance blurry to an infant.
• By 6 months, visual acuity is increased to about
20/100.
• By 12 months, they see about as well as an adult.
• Newborns can sense movement, colors, changes in
brightness, and a variety of visual patterns.

9. INTERMODAL PERCEPTION
• Intermodal perception-The ability to use one sensory
modality to identify a stimulus or pattern of a stimulus that is
already familiar through another modality.
• Touch and sight are integrated at birth.
-Infants expect to touch and feel objects they can see.
• Research implies vision and hearing are integrated for infants
at about 1-2 months.
-Infants expect to hear their mother’s voice coming from
the direction of her mouth.
• Infants are able to learn face-voice associations of strangers as
early as 3-1/2 months.

10. • Babies only 1 month old can detect, by sight, some of the
same objects they have previously sucked.
• By 4 months, infants can match visual and auditory cues for
distance.
• At 8 months, infants are able to separate object-sound
pairings & detect single modality differences.
• Multi-modal stimuli promotes perceptual differentiation.
• As infants experience multimodal sensory stimuli (using
different senses to learn & identify an object) , they develop
true intermodal perception.
• As they learn to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel, they are able
to distinguish & then reintegrate sensory modalities that are
becoming more differentiated.

11. OVERVIEW
Table 5.3 The Newborn’s Sensory Capabilities