By 5 months infants coordinate movement of the two

By 5 months, infants coordinate movement of the two hands
3. By 2-3 years, children can use zippers but not buttons
4. Tying shoes is a skill that develops around age 6 years
Handedness
1. About 90% of children prefer to use their right hand
2. Most children grasp with their right hand by age 13 months and a clear preference is seen
by 2 years
3. Preference is affected by heredity but environmental factors influence it too
Coming to Know the World: Perception
Learning objectives:
1. Are infants able to smell, to taste, and to experience pain?
2. Can infants hear? How do they use sound to locate objects?
3. How well can infants see? Can they see color and depth?
4. How do infants coordinate information between different sensory modalities, such as
between vision and hearing?
Newborns have a good sense of smell
a. They react to pleasant and unpleasant odors
b. They turn toward pads soaked in their own amniotic fluid, or the odors of their mother’s
breast
Newborns can differentiate between tastes
a. They differentiate between salty, sour, bitter, and sweet
b. Facial reactions are obvious reactions to sweet tastes
Touch and Pain
1. Babies react to touch with reflexes and other movements

2. Babies react to painful stimuli with the pain cry: a sudden, high-pitched wail, and they
are not easily soothed
Hearing
1. Startle reactions suggest that infants are sensitive to sound
2. 6-month-olds distinguish between different pitches as well as adults
3. By 7 months, infants can use sound to locate direction and distance
Seeing
1. Newborns respond to light and track moving objects with their eyes
2. Visual Acuity (clarity of vision) is the smallest pattern that can be distinguished
dependably
3. Infants at 1 month see at 20 feet what adults see about 200-400 feet
4. By 1 year, the infant’s visual acuity is the same as adults
Color
1. Newborns perceive few colors
2. 1-month-old infants can differentiate between blue and gray, as well as red from green
3. 3-to 4-month-old infants can perceive colors similarly to adults
Depth
1. Visual cliff studies show that children as young as 6 weeks react with emotional
indicators or interest to differences in depth
2. At 7 months, show fear of the deep side of the cliff
3. Infants at 4-6 months use retinal disparity (the difference between the images of objects
in each eye) to discern depth
4. Infants of 5 months use motion and interposition to perceive depth
Perceiving Objects
1. Perception of objects is limited in newborns, but develops soon
2. When looking at faces, 1-month-old infants concentrate on the outside edges
3. Three-month-olds concentrate on the interior of the face
Integrating Sensory Information
1. Infants soon begin to perceive the link between visual images and sounds
2. Infants seem to pay more attention to intersensory redundancy, or information
simultaneously coming from different sensory modes
Becoming Self-Aware
Learning Objectives
1. When do children begin to realize that they exist?