Early Sensory Capacities

Vision

At birth the nerves and muscles and lens of the eye are still developing.
Visual acuity varies from 20/240 to 20/640.
Head movement indicates some vision.
Infants show an interest in human faces soon after birth and prefer to look at faces rather than other objects.
- Also show a preference for attractive, smiling faces.
Prefer familiar over unfamiliar objects
Visual acuity and color in newborns improve over time.

In the first two months of postnatal development, infants don’t perceive obstructed objects as complete, instead perceiving only what is visible.
“Visual cliff” study was designed to test depth perception and visual expectations.
- Infants will not crawl over the edge.
- Their perception of affordances let them crawl or not crawl over the cliff.
- Use of ‘binocular cues’ by age 3 to 4 months suggests depth perception even before infants can crawl.

Hearing begins in the womb.
Changes that take place during infancy involve perception of volume, pitch, localization.
One of the keys to language development
Newborns respond to touch and can feel pain.
Newborns can differentiate odors.
Sensitivity to taste is present even before birth.
Over the first several months of age, infants begin to prefer salty tastes.