Seeing as we can’t come out and ask them (how wonderful would life be if we could?), when it comes to what a baby sees, wants and needs, we rely on experts from the fields of medicine and science.
Thanks to new research carried out by scientists in Sweden and Norway, we finally have an insight into how our emotional expressions appear to our newborn babies.
As part of the study, the experts produced moving images of adult faces expressing emotions ranging from happiness to anger and surprise. Using information previously gathered regarding how young infants perceive structure, contrast, spacing and other visual cues, the experts were then able to filter out certain images from their study.
With 48 images left, the researchers showed them to adults to determine whether they could make out the expressions within.
Commenting on the reasoning behind this move, co-author Professor Claes von Hofsten said: “We…reasoned that if an adult human subject could make out what was presented, a newborn child could, in principle, do it too. However, if an adult could not make out what was shown, a newborn could not do it either.”
Subsequently, they found that adults were able to correctly identify on average three out of the four faces when viewing them at a distance of 30 centimetres (almost one foot).
Based on this finding, researchers concluded that infants as young as two days old could also see their parents’ expressions at the same distance, which is about the distance between a child’s face and their nursing mother. However, when the distance increases, babies’ vision becomes too blurry to make out the expression.
While the experts were able to determine what a baby sees, they have not yet explored what the baby can make sense of from these expressions.
