Infant Perceptual Abilities

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When babies are born, their sensory and perceptual abilities are extremely limited when compared to adults. However, infants come with specific sets of sensory and perceptual skills that will foster them to improve on their abilities in these areas as they grow. Sensations are an important part of infant’s development because it is how he or she learns about their new environment. An infant’s perceptual abilities are of equal importance because it help the infant to make meaningful attributions to each sensation that one encounters.
Sensations are the process of taking in raw information from ones environment around them. These sensory elements include an infant’s ability to smell, taste, see, feel and hear. In regards to an infant’s visual acuity they can see at about 20/200 – 20/400 in comparison to an adults visual acuity at 20/20. An infant’s auditory abilities do not seem to differ much in comparison to an adult. An infant’s sense of smell and taste are less unknown, however we know that they are connected. For instance, when you cannot smell your taste is affected. Scientist know that infants can taste four distinctive taste, sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Furthermore, an infant’s most developed sense is their sense of touch and motion.
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This is called perception. An infant’s perceptual abilities is surprisingly mature. Young infants have the abilities to discriminate among sounds, sights, taste and physical sensations. For instance, infants have the ability to distinguish his or her mother’s odors, face and voice from others. Infants can also locate the direction and range of a sound. In addition, as mentioned before we know they can discriminate between four different taste sweet, sour, salty and bitter, plus a fifth called umami, which is an amino acid found in meat, fish and