The Intelligence of Newborns

Nature has a remarkable way of equipping each of us with just what we need to survive. Babies are no exception. After surviving the prenatal hazards, a baby is born into the world with everything it needs to survive in a parental environment. When you start thinking in this way, you see that the baby is really a very clever fellow.

Instincts and Reflexes

Babies demonstrate remarkable instinctual reflexes to different situations. If hurt, we withdraw out limbs to protect ourselves; if a cloth covers our face, we move our head left and right and swipe at it with our hands; and if something touches our cheek, we open our mouth, ready for feeding. Feeding itself is a complicated maneuver including breathing, swallowing, and sucking simultaneously. Perhaps the most famous of all, crying, occurs when the baby does not get the food he or she wants, and far from accidentally, the noise is so bothersome that it encourages parents to get the baby what it wants to make it stop. In a sense, the baby is training you! As any parent knows, babies even have different cries for different needs. It seems like a lot is going on in that little head of his.

What Can a Baby See?

For a long time it was thought that babies were essentially blind, but in the 1960s, scientists began to do some experiments to see how babies react to their environment. They used eye tracking devices and electrical pacifiers to see what a baby can see, smell, hear, and even think. One of the things that they found is that a baby becomes less interested in something after it has seen it for a while. The same is true of all of us; how many people live in a big city, but never look at the architecture? The boredom with familiar objects plays an important role with how we were able to test what babies could see and remember.

Findings

Babies, like adults, focus on faces before anything else. When shown a series of pictures of cats, a baby is most surprised and interested by a picture of a cat with a dog's head than a dog with a cat's head. This suggests that babies look to faces to remember things and people. As newborns, we turn our head towards voices, and studies even show that we gaze longer at face-like images. When given the choice between squares arranged to look like eyes and a mouth and squares arranged like an upside down face, babies choose to spend more time looking at the face-like image. Infants also learn their mother's voice and smell. When they hear their mother speaking, they suck more on their pacifier even.

Babies learn a lot in the first few months of their life. Brain studies show that we are born with the largest amount of neurons that we will ever have and after 15 months, the neural connections grow exponentially from what they were at birth. Infants are clever little people after all.

Source: Psychology 9th edition Myers