By Dr. S. H. Jacob
www.shjacob.io
Author, Your Baby’s Brain, Intellect, and Yo
Content Writer, SmartBabies App
What Newborns Know
In this article, I will tell you about the host of abilities your baby possesses from the moment of birth. Newborns are not the incompetent, passive, reactive creatures some may assume they are; rather, they are active knowledge-seeking, knowledge-making, know-how-inventing creatures. The experiences that they have during the early years will have a telling effect on how these abilities develop.
Introduction
Many parents don’t expect much from their newborns. They believe that a child has to experience things over a long time before she can begin to sense, much less know anything. Some even believe that newborns can’t see, hear, feel, taste, or smell. Even today, some self-appointed experts consider newborns to be helpless, incompetent creatures who arrive in this world unprepared, passive, and unintelligent. They see babies as empty receptacles waiting to be stuffed with knowledge.
Babies can function in remarkable ways from birth. The reflexes and perceptions that they are born with serving them quite well. These sensorimotor systems enable them to adapt to the world around them in some limited yet functional ways. For example, when a bulky object like a box is pushed toward them, newborns only a few days old will thrust their heads back and raise their hands to protect their faces.
The pages that I want to share with you are some fascinating information, just like the reaction described above. I’ve tried to select interesting and relevant experiments to illustrate the marvelous abilities of the human newborn.
The resulting picture says three things: (a) newborns are much more intelligent than we ever thought they’d be, (b) they can learn things quickly and easily if we know what to do and when to do it, and (c) what makes them unique is the type of experience they have in the early years.
Let’s now take a panoramic view of the landscape of a newborn’s world of knowledge and know-how—what she knows about things and people and what abilities she has.
Knowing What Babies Know
How do we know what babies know? Psychologists have developed a few techniques to help them answer this question. First, we observe them in their natural setting. For example, how long do they sleep, and how long do they stay awake? Second, we observe their reaction to different kinds of stimulation. What do they do when you shine a weak light in their eyes? What do they do when you snap your fingers? Do they turn their head in the direction of the sound? When we make faces, stick our tongues or open our mouths wide, do they imitate us? How old are they when they do these things? Third, we can capitalize on the fact that newborns, like the rest of us, get bored when they experience the same thing over and over again. If you play a note or show a picture to a newborn over and over again, the baby will get bored and lose interest in it. This is what we call habituation. Dishabituation is, of course, just the opposite. It refers to renewed interest in something. So if we show a baby a happy face over and over again, she will show less and less interest in it. If we then show her a sad face, and she perks up, we know that she can tell the difference between the happy face and the sad face. This is an important tool in studying newborns. And it can be used to test virtually all the senses. Fourth, we can use the amount of time that newborns do something as an indication of their abilities. So if we show them two things, such as a happy face and a sad face, and they spend more time looking at the happy one, we know that they can tell the difference between the two faces and that they prefer the happy face to the sad one. Using these techniques, developmental psychologists have been able to map out a whole host of newborn competencies.
Here are some of the most important ones.
Your Newborn’s Motor Skills
Your baby is born with a working motor system that is the basis of much of her future learning and development. At the heart of this system is a set of survival reflexes including crying, sound making, sneezing, coughing, sucking, eye movements (blinking, focusing, tracking), grasping, and swallowing. Objects and events in your baby’s surroundings trigger these actions. If, for example, you stroke a newborn’s cheek or the area near her mouth with your hand, her head turns and her tongue moves toward your hand. Once she finds your hand, she begins sucking. Or, if you shine a small light into her eyes, or clap your hands in front of her face, she will close her eyes tightly.
Your Newborn’s Sensory Skills
A newborn’s senses are developed well enough to enable her to survive and learn. Here’s a summary of what your baby senses from the moment she is born.
Vision
While her vision is blurry, a newborn can see pretty well as long as the object is about ten inches from her nose. This is how Mother Nature designed it. After all, this is exactly where her mother’s face is when she breastfeeds her. A newborn knows her mommy’s face and prefers it to strange ones.
Hearing
Hearing is functional even before birth. After two or three days a newborn’s hearing is good enough to make out different voices, and it keeps improving well into the elementary school years. A newborn’s hearing is especially sensitive to human voices. She can even discriminate familiar voices from strange ones and prefers the familiar.
Smell
The sense of smell is also functional at birth. Experiments show that newborns sense the same odors that adults do. Furthermore, they often, but not always, have the same likes and dislikes as adults. Any early differences seem to disappear by the time they reach three years old.
Taste
Newborns respond to all four basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. It is also well established that they prefer sweet to other tastes.
Touch
Touch differs from the rest of the senses in that it consists of many sensations: temperature, pain, pressure, and vibration. A newborn responds to all of these sensations.
Other Competencies of Your Newborn
Aside from her motor and sensory abilities, your newborn has some miraculous social abilities. These abilities are designed to endear her to you: she knows her mommy’s face and voice and can distinguish them from others, she may be able to imitate your facial expressions, and she can take turns “conversing” with you.
When it comes to a newborn’s knowledge of the physical world, you will, once again, be amazed. Your newborn can anticipate where a traveling object is headed; she can trace the outline of a complicated picture, separating one item from another; she can see depth, realizing that there is a drop in the surface of a table or another object; she can detect brightness and movement and can track a voice by moving her head in the direction of a voice, and she can express surprise at an unexpected event.
Let’s look at some ingenious studies that illustrate your newborn’s phenomenal abilities.
What Your Newborn Knows About People
Newborns only two to three days old show a preference for their mother’s voice and turn their heads in the direction of her voice. This raises the question: Do they learn their mother’s voice while in the womb, or are they such fast learners that they learn it in the first day or two of life?
Dr. Seuss Stories
DeCasper and Fifer reported a fascinating study that answers this question. Newborns, only two days old, were placed comfortably on their backs with headsets on their ears. A pacifier geared to a tape player was placed in their mouths. When the baby sucked at a certain rate, the tape played her mother’s voice reading a Dr. Seuss story. If the baby varied her sucking rate, the tape would continue to play the Dr. Seuss story, only this time it was read by a different woman. Over eighty-five percent of the babies tested adjusted their sucking rate so that they could hear their own mothers’ voices. When the experimenters changed the rate at which the baby could hear the mother’s voice, the babies quickly adjusted their sucking so they could continue to hear her voice. What’s even more impressive is that newborns were able to start a new session where they had left off the previous session! This suggests that they have developed a practical memory—they could remember the previous day’s experience!
To find out whether the babies had learned their mothers’ voices in those two days after birth or whether they got used to it while they were still in the womb, experimenters recruited the babies’ fathers. Kolata repeated the experiment, only this time with the father’s voice and another man’s voice reading the Dr. Suess story. From the moment of birth, babies were handed over to their fathers, who talked to them all the time, sometimes for ten hours at a time, for two to three days. These babies heard no one else except their father. The result: Babies showed no preference for their father’s voice. Since the human ear develops well enough to hear seven months after conception, these fascinating experiments suggest that the fetus learns her mother’s voice and develops a preference for it well before she is born.
Face to Face
Newborns know human faces from the moment they are born and prefer them to other objects. In another ingenious experiment, Dr. Robert Fantz of Case Western University studied the eye movements of newborns only a few days old. Lying comfortably on their backs, the babies were shown two patterns of the features of a human face (mouth, eyes, nose). One pattern contained all the elements of the face in the proper arrangement. The other pattern, while containing the same mouth, eyes, and nose, was not arranged as a human face. The idea was to see which of the two faces attracted and kept the young children’s attention longer. Invariably, newborns preferred the human face to the haphazardly arranged one.
This preference suggests that newborns only a few days old can distinguish one pattern as meaningful while dismissing the other as nonsense. This makes sense; after all, a baby’s survival is dependent on her knowledge of the human face, and bonding with her mother or caretaker, relating to her and interacting with her all depend on knowing a human face.
Imitating Mom or Dad
As we mentioned earlier, for years psychologists used to think that newborns couldn’t imitate until they were a few months old. More recently, some studies of infant imitation showed that newborns have an innate ability to imitate facial expressions.
For example, Andrew Meltzoff conducted many studies on infant imitation. He found that newborns could imitate an adult’s facial expressions only hours after birth. Within a few trials they could, for example, stick their tongue out or open their mouths wide just like he did. The fact newborns prefer human faces and can imitate facial expressions seems to be strong evidence that they know they are human!
Conversations of Sorts
Only moments after birth, newborns carry on “conversations” by maintaining social interactions with you, if only you give them a chance to take turns or what’s been called “serve and return.” When you talk, your baby will stay still, and when you stop talking, your baby will do something. For example, she might thrash her legs or arms about to interact with you.
What Your Newborn Knows About Things
Here are some other fascinating experiments that tell us whether newborns know anything at all about the physical world. You will be surprised to learn about these fascinating experiments and what they reveal about newborns’ abilities when it comes to the physical world around them.
Stripes, Contrasts
By recording a newborn’s eye movements as she looks at a picture, we can tell that she is tracing the outlines of the picture. This ability is critical in telling the difference between an object and its background. Using the same technique, we know that newborns focus on stripes and color contrasts. This knowledge is important in knowing where one object ends and another begins.
Brightness, Movement, and Tracking
Studies have shown that newborns are sensitive to brightness — changing the brightness causes them to squint. We also know that when newborns are only two to three days old, they can detect movement and visually follow a moving object. What’s more, newborns can turn their heads in the direction of the sound, expecting to see something where the noise is.
Surprise, Surprise
Another example of how newborns are born knowing certain things is how they respond to surprise. Research shows that babies manifest attention, curiosity, and interest as a natural response to the element of surprise. In addition, PET scans (positron emission tomography), a technique that measures the electric activity of the brain, shows that a flurry of brain activity results from an unexpected event.
Seeing In 3-D
Back when some experts were debating whether newborns can see at all, a celebrated experiment carried out back in 1960 by Eleanor Gibson of Cornell University showed that babies can not only see, they can perceive depth.
Thirty-six babies between the ages of six and a half and fourteen months were placed in the middle of a transparent table approximately eight feet square. Half of the table was covered with a tablecloth so that the floor was not visible from the tabletop, while the other half was left uncovered so that the floor could be seen easily. Then the entire table was covered with a glass top so that the feel of the surface on both halves would be the same. A baby’s mother would stand at the end of the transparent side of the table. The experimenter would then place the baby on top of the table that was covered with the tablecloth. To reach his mother, the baby would have to crawl over his half of the table and then over the transparent or “deep” top. Everybody waited to see whether the baby would crawl over to her mother. Most of the babies refused to crawl over the “deep” section of the table. Even when the babies’ mothers tried to coax them into crawling toward the transparent side, only three babies tried it. Some, having reached the center, stopped and began crying, presumably wanting to get close to their mothers yet afraid to do so.
Dr. Gibson argued that the ability to perceive depth was not learned, but inherited. The flaw with Gibson’s experiment was that it didn’t prove that children hadn’t learned depth perception after birth, as all the children in the study were at least six and a half months old. However, later research with even younger children substantiated her claim by using different techniques that did not require the child to crawl. Dr. Gibson herself addressed that concern in her next set of experiments, by using animals that can walk the minute they’re born, such as goats. This time, the animals had no chance to learn anything—they either had been born with depth perception or not. Not surprisingly, these animals refused to cross the middle line where the “visual cliff” started.
Conclusion
This is the picture of your newborn’s abilities. Far from being a helpless, incompetent, empty receptacle, she comes equipped with some basic sensory and motor skills, plus enough knowledge of people to endear herself to her parents, and she quickly builds on her abilities. She also knows a thing or two about the world of things—such as where one thing ends and another begins, and how to track a moving object. Great as these abilities are, they are not the whole story. What is beneath all of this is a tendency to become a full-fledged human being, to reach her full potential. This tendency is inherent in her. It is what drives her to understand, to make sense of people, events, and things in her life. It is what makes her a meaning maker. Armed with the knowledge of your baby’s nature and capacities, we are now ready to take a look at the specific strategies and methods that will help you provide your baby with opportunities for enriching experiences.
