infant perception

infant perception, process by which a human infant (age 0 to 12 months) gains awareness of and responds to external stimuli. At birth, infants possess functional sensory systems; vision is somewhat organized, and audition (hearing), olfaction (smell), and touch are fairly mature. However, infants lack perceptual knowledge, which must be gained through experience with the world around them. As infants’ senses mature, they begin to coordinate information obtained through multiple sensory modalities. The process of coordination, known as intermodal perception, begins early and improves across infancy.

Basic visual function

Most basic visual functions are operational yet relatively immature at birth. Visual acuity, the ability to distinguish fine detail, is estimated at about 20/400 for most newborns. In healthy normally developing infants, acuity improves rapidly within the first few months. Contrast sensitivity, the ability to detect luminance differences between two adjacent areas (such as stripes on a grating), is also reduced in newborns relative to adults but develops as infants gain visual experience. Colour vision also develops, nearing the perceptual ability of adults by four to six months.

The perception of motion is an important part of an individual’s visual interpretation of his or her environment. Objects and people in the environment move in many different ways (laterally, vertically, toward and away from the observer, and rotating) and at different velocities. Infants’ responses to slow and fast motion velocities differ depending on age and the type of motion observed. Thus, separate perception mechanisms may exist for different types of motion. Moreover, infants’ own motion also contributes to motion perception. Despite the complex nature of motion, nearly all types of motion perception develop by about six months in healthy infants.

Depth perception also gradually develops during the first several months. Infants first become sensitive at about two months to kinematic, or motion-carried information for distance, as when one surface moves in front of another. At about four months, infants are able to perceive depth via the difference in the optical projections at the two retinas to determine depth, known as stereopsis. Stereoscopic depth cues provide information about distances of objects in near space as a function of their relative horizontal positions in the visual field. At about seven months, infants are able to perceive depth in a flat, two-dimensional picture.

Visual attention

Infants are born with a functional oculomotor (eye-movement) system. The muscles that move the eyes and the brain-stem mechanisms that control the eye muscles directly appear to be fully mature at birth, and infants make good use of these systems to scan the visual environment. Two developmental events seem to be particularly important to the control of visual attention: the emergence of smooth pursuit, at about two months, and increasing top-down control over saccadic, or scanning, eye movements, which can take much longer. Smooth pursuit helps an individual track moving targets in the environment and stabilize gaze. Saccades are used when inspecting visual stimuli. Both kinds of eye movements are believed to develop along with specialized brain regions, such as those involved in processing information about motion and objects.

Object perception

Object perception is complex, involving multiple information-processing tasks, such as perceiving boundaries, shapes, sizes, and substances of objects. Understanding object boundaries first requires recognizing where one object ends and another object or surface begins. Detecting edges is critical for this process, and the intersection of edges provides information for the relative distance of object and surfaces. For example, where one edge is seen to lead into and end abruptly at another, the uninterrupted edge is usually nearer to the observer. Infants typically become capable of recognizing boundaries between three and five months.

Recognizing object boundaries alone does not necessarily reveal the complete size or shape of an object. In some cases, objects are partly hidden by other surfaces nearer to the observer. The perception of partly occluded objects as complete is first accomplished at about two months. Objects also have constant size and shape, even when viewed at varying distances and angles. Newborns, despite their limited visual experience, appear to have some sense of both size and shape constancy.

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Face perception

Newborns show a consistent preference for looking at faces relative to other stimuli throughout infancy. Newborns’ ability to recognize facelike patterns suggests that they may have an inherent ability to perceive faces before having actually viewed a face. Alternatively, it may indicate that faces match infants’ preferences for particular types of stimuli, such as those with specific spatial characteristics.

Infants are able to recognize familiar faces despite variations in expression and perspective. They also can discriminate gender in faces. Most infants show preferences for females; however, infants who are handled primarily by males express preference for male faces. Infants’ sensitivity to facial expressions emerges early; for example, different intensities of smiling can be perceived by three months. By seven months, infants can discriminate an extensive range of the facial expressions, including happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and surprise, although it is unlikely that they understand the content of this range of emotions at this age. Researchers have identified several areas in the brain that are involved in face perception, including the middle fusiform gyrus in the right hemisphere and the amygdala. Experience with faces is thought to facilitate the development of brain areas that process facial information.

Auditory perception

In the second trimester of pregnancy, the inner ear becomes fully developed, allowing the fetus to have limited auditory experiences in the womb. As a result, fetuses show distinct responses to sounds of various intensities and frequencies. Neonates’ auditory perception appears to be influenced by prenatal experiences with sounds. For example, newborns prefer listening to their own mother’s voice over the voice of another woman.

Despite the physical maturity of the cochlea about two-thirds of the way through gestation, sound conduction through the external and middle ear to the inner ear is inefficient at birth, hindering the transmission of information to the auditory neural pathway. Perception of low frequencies is poor in young infants relative to high frequencies. In fact, low-frequency discrimination does not mature until about 10 years, but discrimination of high frequencies is superior in infants relative to that of adults.

The most common measure used when testing intensity processing for pure tones is the absolute threshold, the smallest intensity of sound detectable in a quiet environment. The absolute threshold improves throughout infancy and reaches adult levels by puberty, and the higher the frequency, the earlier adult levels are achieved. For example, the absolute threshold level at 4,000 and 10,000 hertz (Hz) reaches adult levels by age five, whereas the level for 1,000 Hz requires 10 years or more to reach maturity. Between one and three months, the absolute threshold improves by 15 decibels (dB); between three and six months, a 15-dB improvement occurs for the threshold at 4,000 Hz.

In contrast to pure tones, many sounds in the environment are complex, made up of multiple frequencies and various intensities. For example, perception of timbre, such as hearing differences in the way different musical instruments sound, involves comparison of different intensities across frequencies. As early as seven months, infants can discriminate between sounds of different timbres with the same pitch, but adult levels of competence at discriminating a series of complex timbres are not reached until well into childhood.

The ability to locate the source of sounds is required to accurately perceive sound in the environment. Spectral shape and intensity and binaural comparisons provide information on positions in elevation (the vertical plane) and azimuth (the horizontal plane), respectively. Infants tend to use spectral shape more than binaural comparisons when locating the source of a sound, possibly because they are more sensitive to differences in sound frequency than to differences in sound intensity.

Once different types of auditory information have been received, they need to be organized into perceptually meaningful elements. For example, for a conversation to be followed, speech produced by members of the family must be grouped together and noises from children playing outside must be filtered out. The process of grouping is partly functional in infants, but it is more easily disrupted in children than in adults. Part of this process is ignoring irrelevant sounds while attending to the relevant sound source. Infants, unlike adults, often seem to act as if they are not sure about disregarding irrelevant sounds. For example, studies with seven- to nine-month-old infants suggest that they cannot detect a pure tone when presented simultaneously with a wide-frequency noise band.

Speech perception

Infants appear to have difficulty segregating speech from other competing sounds. Thus, when interacting with infants, adult caregivers often compensate for this difficulty by making major acoustic adjustments in their speech, such as the use of infant-directed speech, which contains exaggerated pitch contours, a higher register, repetitions, and simpler sentences.

A central question in this area concerns whether infants respond to phonetic differences in a manner similar to that of adults. Studies examining cross-language and native-language speech perception suggest that infants are born with universal sensitivity to the phonemes that are present in all languages. Phonemes are components of a language that distinguish words by forming the contrasting element in pairs of words, such as the /r/ and /l/ in rake and lake. There is a developmental loss of “unused” initial sensitivities. For example, a study of English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and six- to eight-month-old infants from English-speaking families demonstrated that infants distinguished two distinct phonemes with similar sounds in both English and Hindi—/ta/ and /da/ in English and the retroflex /D/ and dental /d/ in Hindi—whereas adults distinguished only between different phonemes in their native language. These phonemes are all produced by placing the tongue against the alveolar ridge, just behind the teeth, and releasing it in time with voice onset. They vary with respect to the precise part of the tongue and alveolar ridge involved and to voice-onset timing.

Infants often exhibit preferences for speech sounds over nonspeech sounds; the former can help in attending to signals in the environment necessary for language acquisition. But infants do not always prefer speech. In addition, speech preference does not appear to be a result of prenatal auditory exposure to human speech, and infants are attentive to other forms of communication, including sign language.

Newborns also are sensitive to prosody, the patterns of rhythm and intonation in speech, and may use prosody to discriminate one language from another. Prosody appears to be the primary way for young infants to perceive speech. This is especially useful in bilingual environments, because it helps infants avoid potential confusion.

Intermodal perception

Adults experience the world through the integration of sensory impressions. Infants, to some extent, are capable of coordinating information perceived through different senses. Newborns can detect “arbitrary” auditory-visual relations that are presented during a period of familiarization (a particular shape paired with a particular sound). Most intermodal relations in the world, however, are quite specific rather than arbitrary. An example is speech, which can be simultaneously heard and seen in a talking face. Adults’ phoneme perception is strongly influenced by watching faces, the so-called McGurk effect. When adults hear a syllable while looking at a face producing a different syllable, they tend to perceive the sound associated with the lip movements rather than the actual phoneme that they heard. Five-month-old infants are also susceptible to this effect.

Infants also can use the duration of events to integrate information across modalities and may be capable of abstracting amodal rhythmic structure from auditory-visual pairings. At five months, infants can detect changes in regularly or irregularly occurring rhythmic auditory or visual sequences regardless of whether the modality of presentation is changed. By four to five months, infants may be able to recognize and discriminate objects by using information that is perceived through vision and touch.