Question
What are perceptual development skills in infants and toddlers?
Answer
Perceptual development is the ability to perceive the world through our senses. Perception helps us to take in, combine, and integrate information using our senses (seeing hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching). Perceptual skills include vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In figure 3, you can see the little one's eyes are brightly focused on something. Perception is part of how infants and toddlers discover and explore the world. Piaget called this the sensory-motor stage of development because they were sensing and moving. Perception helps children apply new and prior learning from one sense to another which allows them to begin to classify and make assumptions about objects and materials.
Newborn Senses
Early sense experiences for newborns are a little different than for older children. Vision is the slowest sense to develop and is a little blurry when children are born. As early as seven weeks after conception, 10,000 taste buds appear on the tongue. By 28 weeks in utero, the auditory cortex is developed enough to perceive loud noises. At birth, infants can distinguish their mother's smell and her voice. There are some great videos on that from Dr. Berry Brazelton on the internet.
Vision
As I said, an infant's vision is not fully developed at birth and is a little blurry. Infants' eyes don't track right when they are first born, but within that first month, their eye movement begins to strengthen. They can distinguish light from dark at birth. They find that the human face is the most interesting object for them to look at. So when you're holding a baby, hold them in that natural position as if a mother was nursing where they are in close proximity to your face. Let the baby begin to look at your face, explore it, and touch it.
Infants from birth to three months begin to track objects. Help them do this by placing objects in their view. One way to do this is during tummy time, to help them focus on one object and move it slowly from side to side. This is crossing the midline so the muscles in their eyes can become stronger. Through growth and maturation, they begin to use their vision to begin to differentiate sets and subsets of objects. Also, think about how the environment visually appears to a child. Think about placing children where there's no glare and where they are not right under fluorescent lighting, which overstimulates the brain.
Hearing
The auditory system develops in utero and is fully operative at birth. Babies prefer the sound of the human voice over other sounds. Remember, they also prefer to see human faces over other objects. I think this is part of building attachments and relationships and the social and emotional development that develops at birth. They're learning to listen and discriminate between sounds, which is all part of language development. Infants need exposure to a variety of sounds as well as times where it's quiet so that they hear the natural sounds of our environment and can appreciate the differences in sounds. It's important for you to balance that out for children so what they're hearing it's not overly loud or stimulating. There should be an ebb and flow with a nice rhythm to the sounds that they're hearing.
Smell and taste
Like hearing, smell and taste are well developed at birth. Babies prefer sweet smells and show a preference for breast milk versus other tastes. They'll often wrinkle their noses when they are exposed to bitter or sour tastes. When we're introducing new foods to babies, it's important to know that the textures will be new for them. They may respond to the smell, taste, temperature, and texture of the food. They may respond with a funny face because it's new. Don't think that they don't like it, it's just they're exploring something new that they haven't experienced before.
Notice their responses and introduce foods slowly. It may be that at first, they don't like the texture of something but you might reintroduce it in another month and see how they do with it then. They'll begin to signal their preferences for certain foods between six and 10 months. They'll let you know when they're finished or they want more. There you can use some sign language to help with that as well.
Touch
Individual babies vary in their sensitivity to touch. Some children are overly sensitive to touch, but it is another way they learn about the world. Where and how we touch is influenced by families and culture. To encourage tactile experiences there are many things you can do. Here are some examples:
- Provide a weekly sensory tub.
- Make Oobleck using corn starch and water.
- Use sandboxes with a variety of toys for pouring and sifting sand.
- Provide water play and water activities.
- Provide sensory boxes and dress-up activities with a variety of materials and textures.
Mixing corn starch and water provides plenty of sensory experiences for children ages two to three years. While sandboxes provide opportunities for sensory experiences, make sure children do not eat the sand. Adding water to the sandbox changes the texture of the sand and provides a different sensory experience. You can create sensory boxes with doors or things that open and close and have different textures, such as rough like sandpaper or sticky like double-sided tape. There are many ideas on Pinterest for making sensory boxes. Providing dress-up activities with different materials also ties in to language and literacy as children learn words for their tactile sensations such as soft, sticky, warm, fuzzy, rough, smooth, hard, et cetera.
Multi-sensory experiences
Outdoor settings positively support all the sensory and perceptual domains and help children develop their physical senses and physical movement. I feel strongly about children spending as much time outdoors as possible with the freedom to run and play as they test out their running, walking, and balance skills.
Think about nature as your co-teacher because there are so many sensory experiences that happen in nature. It is also a great place to let children be messy and explore. If children learn to paint indoors, take it outdoors because painting outdoors is a totally different sensory experience for children where they feel the wind and hear the noises versus painting indoors. It's one of those that you can do in both areas if you can. Playing ball in a classroom versus playing with a ball or toys outdoors is quite different. Natural light, fresh air, and the sights and sounds of nature contribute to a young child’s sensory integration.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Exploring Physical and Language Development of Infants and Toddlers, presented by Jean Barbre, EdD.
