The Infant's Senses

Newborns can feel all different sensations, but respond most enthusiastically to soft stroking, cuddling and caressing. Gentle rocking back and forth will oftentimes calm a crying infant, as will massages and warm baths. Newborns may comfort themselves by sucking their thumbs, or a pacifier. The need to suckle is instinctive and allows newborns to feed.

Newborn infants have unremarkable vision, being able to focus on objects only about 18 inches (45 cm) directly in front of their face. While this may not be much, it is all that is needed for the infant to look at the mother’s face when breastfeeding. When a newborn is not sleeping, or feeding, or crying, he or she may spend a lot of time staring at random objects. Usually anything that is shiny, has sharp contrasting colors, or has complex patterns will catch an infant's eye. However, the newborn has a preference for looking at other human faces above all else.

While still inside the mother, the infant could hear many internal noises, such as the mother's heartbeat, as well as many external noises including human voices, music and most other sounds. Therefore, although a newborn's ears may have some mucous and fluid, he or she can hear sound from birth. Newborns usually respond to a female's voice over a male's. This may explain why people will unknowingly raise the pitch of their voice when talking to newborns. The sound of other human voices, especially the mother's, can have a calming or soothing effect on the newborn. Conversely, loud or sudden noises will startle and scare a newborn.

Newborns can respond to different tastes, including sweet, sour, bitter, and salty substances, with preference toward sweets.

A newborn has a developed sense of smell at birth, and within the first week of life can already distinguish the differences between the mother's own breast milk and the breast milk of another female.

Babies. What, Where, When

Infant is a slightly more formal word for baby, the youngest category of child. The word "infant" derives from the Latin word in-fans, meaning "unable to speak." "Infant" is also a legal term with the (quite different) meaning of minor; that is, any child under the age of legal adulthood. A human infant less than a month old is a newborn infant or a neonate. The term "newborn" includes premature infants and postmature infants, as well as full term newborns.

A newborn's head is very large in proportion to the rest of the body, and the cranium is enormous relative to his or her face. While the adult human skull is about 1/8 of the total body length, the newborn's is twice that. At birth, many regions of the newborn's skull have not yet been converted to bone. These "soft spots" are known as fontanels; and the two largest are the diamond-shaped anterior fontanel, located at the top front portion of the head, and the smaller triangular-shaped posterior fontanel, which lies at the back of the head.