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Essay on Infant Sensory Development

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Have you ever wondered exactly how infants perceive the world around them? If infants are exposed to certain foods in their prenatal development and are exposed to the food through their mother during breastfeeding after birth, will they remember that particular food later on in their life and prefer its taste to other foods? Is their sense of smell acute after birth or is it acquired over time? How do infants use the sense of touch to form relationships and learn about the fascinating world around them? Are they born with the ability to see the myriad of colors contained in the rainbow or is this ability developed after birth? Do infants tend to rely more heavily on their vision or their hearing to retrieve information from the …show more content…

Even amidst all of these limitations, however, there are studies that are significant in helping us to better comprehend how infants view, process, and understand the world around them through their five senses: taste, smell, touch, vision, and hearing.
Infants’ Sense of Taste According to researcher Julie Menella, infants do have a sense of taste that is present at a very young age (Holden, 2000, p. 4). Her research experiment involved forty-six women during the final three months of pregnancy. After these women were selected, they were placed into three distinct and separate groups. The group they were placed in determined both their own and their infants’s eating habits both before and after birth. One group drank water for the remainder of their pregnancy and for six months after their infant’s birth. The second group drank carrot juice during the final three months of their pregnancy, but then stopped drinking carrot juice and began drinking water when they began to breastfeed their infant after birth. Finally, the third group drank water for the last trimester of their pregnancy, but then switched to drinking carrot juice upon beginning breastfeeding (Holden, 2000, p. 4). Six months after the forty-six infants’ birth when they began eating solid food, Menella observed them again. Each infant was fed cereal made with either carrot juice or water as its base (Holden,

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