Expectedly, it is vague in the first four months of life. When
presented with depth, the baby realizes that something is different -
but not what. Babies are born with their eyes open as opposed to most
other animal young ones. Moreover, their eyes are immediately fully
functional. It is the interpretation mechanism that is lacking and this
is why the world looks fuzzy to them. They tend to concentrate on very
distant or on very close objects (their own hand getting closer to
their face). They see very clearly objects 20-25 cm away.
But visual acuity and focusing improve in a matter of days. By the time
the baby is 6 to 8 months old, he sees as well as many adults do,
though the visual system - from the neurological point of view - is
fully developed only at the age of 3 or 4 years. The neonate discerns
some colors in the first few days of his life: yellow, red, green,
orange, gray - and all of them by the age of four months. He shows
clear preferences regarding visual stimuli: he is bored by repeated
stimuli and prefers sharp contours and contrasts, big objects to small
ones, black and white to colored (because of the sharper contrast),
curved lines to straight ones (this is why babies prefer human faces to
abstract paintings). They prefer their mother to strangers. It is not
clear how they come to recognize the mother so quickly. To say that
they collect mental images which they then arrange into a prototypical
scheme is to say nothing (the question is not "what" they do but "how"
they do it). This ability is a clue to the complexity of the internal
mental world of the neonate, which far exceeds our learned assumptions
and theories. It is inconceivable that a human is born with all this
exquisite equipment while incapable of experiencing the birth trauma or
the even the bigger trauma of his own inflation, mental and physical.
As early as the end of the third month of pregnancy, the fetus moves,
his heart beats, his head is enormous relative to his size. His size,
though, is less than 3 cm. Ensconced in the placenta, the fetus is fed
by substances transmitted through the mother's blood vessels (he has no
contact with her blood, though). The waste that he produces is carried
away in the same venue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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