What can a newborn already do?
A baby only days old already prefers its mother's voice and the smell of milk, and may even copy a stuck-out tongue, though that last claim is still argued over.
▶ Start the storyA newborn is more prepared than it looks. In its first days it can already hear, smell, pay attention to faces and react with reflexes nobody taught it.
Hearing gets a head start. Newborns prefer human speech to other sounds, their mother's voice to other voices, and their native language to other languages. Scientists believe these tastes are probably learned in the womb. Smell works early too: babies around three days old prefer the smell of human milk to formula, which points to an innate preference. Vision lags behind: it is blurry at first and only becomes adult-like at about six months. Many studies have found that infants pay special attention to faces, but there is no widely accepted time-frame for when face perception develops.
Then there are reflexes. Stroke a newborn's cheek or mouth and it turns its head toward the touch, searching for it: the rooting reflex, which disappears around four months as it comes under voluntary control. Startle one and you may trigger the Moro reflex, which is believed to be the only unlearned fear in human newborns and may once have helped babies cling to their mothers.
The most startling claim comes from a 1977 experiment. Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore reported that babies only 12 to 21 days old could imitate an adult's facial and manual gestures. Later studies suggest that copying a stuck-out tongue is widespread while other gestures are more mixed, and other studies have failed to replicate the findings, so newborn imitation is still debated.
42 min
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Recap
Newborns hear and smell well and have reflexes at birth, while vision lags and newborn imitation is contested: some studies found it, others failed to replicate it.
💡 A trick to remember it · Ears and nose arrive first, eyes come later: a newborn knows its mother's voice before it can see her face clearly.
Surprising fact · Meltzoff's team tested babies as young as 42 minutes old for imitation of an adult's tongue and face.
Sources (5)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (16 claims) cites at least one of these.