Word: infantes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...womb with a rudimentary sense of vision -it would be rated about 20/500, or "legally blind," as one expert puts it, but eyesight develops rapidly. Newborns start by looking at the edges of things, exploring. Even when the lights are turned out, as infra-red cameras show, an infant's eyes open wide to carry on its investigation of its surroundings. At eight weeks, it can differentiate between shapes of objects as well as colors (generally preferring red, then blue); at three months, it begins to develop stereoscopic vision...
Testing such perceptions can be complicated. At M.I.T.'s Infant Laboratory, for example, University of Tokyo Graduate Student Shinsuke Shimojo has programmed a computer to check whether seven-month-old Whitney Warren can differentiate between a straight bar and a slightly indented bar. The computer makes the indented portion of the second bar move slightly. If Whitney can see the indentation, he will see its movement, and Shimojo, crouching behind the computer screen, can see his eyes move. Most babies spot the movement easily...
Despite their esoteric quality, such experiments can have an immediate practical value: some infants suffer from eye ailments, such as cataracts, severe astigmatism and strabismus, which benefit from treatment much earlier than would once have been possible. No less important, the new research has demonstrated that an impairment of infant vision can damage those parts of the rapidly growing brain that rely on visual information. That brain damage can be permanent unless the eye impairment is treated early...
Pursuing the origins of language back into earliest babyhood is an interesting approach to understanding the infant intellect. No less so is the discovery that this intellect is at work long before any language...
...teach at the University of Washington, Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore. Their study, published in 1977, showed that babies only twelve days old could imitate an adult sticking out a tongue. Meltzoff and Moore demonstrated that if a pacifier in the baby's mouth prevented the infant from imitating the adult, it would remember what it wanted to do until the pacifier was removed; then the baby would promptly stick out its tongue...