Study: Here’s How Your Newborn Actually Sees You After Birth!

Gazing upon my child’s face filled me with joy. That little ball of joy (who was not a hurricane of destruction then) seemed so serene and beatific.

I have never really considered how my baby boy sees the world when he just came out.

Recent article answered my question for me.

What can your child actually see?

Your newborn responds easily to visual stimuli, a conclusive statement backed by studies. Dangling an object in front of my child will cause him to raise his pudgy little arms to it.

Previous studies determine that babies’ vision deteriorate into a blur after 120cm.

Image used in the study (below) for distinguishing faces.

This image depict a rough approximation of the degree of vision a newborn has at the certain distance. The further the distance, the harder it is for a child to distinguish a person’s expression.

A new study has enabled further understanding on how the newborn views the world.

Conducted at the Institute of Psychology in collaboration with the University of Uppsala and Eclipse Optics over in Stockholm, the study is conducted based on the idea that our eyes are more sensitive to motion.

“We reasoned that if adults were unable to identify the depicted facial expressions, then it would also seem unlikely that newborn infants could identify the same expressions.”

-Professor Magnussen

The researchers concluded that “the different expressions could be rather well identified at a distance of 30cm, but when the distance was increased to 120cm their discriminability was much degraded.”

So while newborn babies possesses the theoretical capability to perceive faces and facial expressions, their “low visual resolution” vision is not enough for them to be able to  distinguish faces and facial expressions at moderate distances.

Tinyeyes is a site that converts photographs into approximations of what your child will be seeing, try it out and find out what your child is actually seeing!

News source: University of Oslo’s press release

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