One of the questions parents ask most about babies is related to their vision: See? When do they start watching? How does a newborn see you?
That they have seen since they were born, we have known it for a long time, so the question of whether they see the answer is yes, since they are born they already see. What costs a little more to define is how he sees you and how far he recognizes you.
To answer these questions, researchers from the Institute of Psychology of the University of Oslo and the University of Uppsala in Stockholm have studied the vision of babies and their response when someone is located at different distances and makes various facial gestures and they have managed to determine the best distance to go to a baby.
They are still the 30 cms of always
A few months ago we offered you an entry in which we explain that the best distance to address a newborn is among the 20.3 and 30.5 cm.
AdvertisingCuriously (or perhaps not so curious, but something logical), it is the distance at which it remains mom's face when she is breastfeeding, or the distance from dad's face when he takes him in his arms and cradles him. This means that it is that distance that reassures you the most, which can make you look at the faces of your parents and, consequently, be the moments when you can be calmer: in the arms of mom or dad and being fed.
At the same time, it is the distance that parents make us see that it is fixed in us, that it remains attentive to what we do and say and is, then, the moment we see our son connect with us. And as we like to connect, to look at us and that we can make faces and respond, we would like to hold him in arms that is precisely the moment in which he is safer and more likely to survive (imagine a baby crying in arms and be quiet 10 meters or more from us ... probably we would have already extinguished).
Well, the new study comes to say that the best distance to go to a child is 30 cm. Come on, you haven't discovered anything new.
But ... they have studied other distances, and emotions
According to the researchers, to date the experiments that had been done with babies had been carried out with photographs of people placed closer or further away from the baby's eyes. What they have done for the occasion is put videos in which gestures are changing.
That is to say, they have not offered babies a person showing themselves happy in a photo, angry in another, neutral in the next and surprised in the last, but they have put a video in which a person is changing emotions throughout of the footage. The difference? That it is not the same to see a still image than to see how a face is changing live expression (in theory it is easier to recognize the expressions if we see how it is passed from one to another).
That same video was shown to adults, but filtering the images to be seen as a baby sees us. First the original, which is how we see adults, then 30 cm (30 cm from the baby), 60 cm and 120 cm. To give you an idea of what adults saw and to know how babies see us, look at the following image:
Well, the adults who watched the videos were right on average 3 of the 4 expressions in the 30 cm video (I guess it didn't look as good as in the photo). When watching the following videos the failure rate was higher and in the 120 cm they were the same as if the choice was random.
This gave them the answer they were looking for. Newborns are able to appreciate the variation of emotions, people's gestures, 30 cm away (And that's why many can even copy our faces, sticking out their tongues if we take it out, for example). Beyond those 30 cm they are not able to do it.
Now, there is a great doubt, which is one of the authors of the study:
It is important to remember that we have only investigated what the newborn can really see, not if they are able to make sense.
We know they can see emotions if we get close enough, but it is not known if they can interpret them. What do you think? I am sure that yes, they prefer a smiling face to a very serious one.
