Children begin to react to people's faces and pay more attention to them than to other objects of the environment even before birth, inside the womb, British scientists say in an article published in the journal Current Biology.
“We found that the fetus can distinguish between objects of different shapes and prefers to keep track of things that look like human faces than other objects. We have known about this behavior in children for several decades, but it never occurred to anyone before how the fetal vision works,”says Vincent Reid from the University of Lancaster (UK).
Ultrasound photography of the face and hands of a baby in the womb / Photo: Kirsty Dunn & Vincent reid
Children in the womb and babies in the organisms of female mammals and eggs of birds, as scientists today believe, are not as isolated from the outside world as was previously believed. For example, in recent years, biologists have discovered that songbirds chicks can produce trills, by which their mothers recognize them, even before they hatch from an egg, and baby squirrels and other mammals receive information from the mother's body about the world around them, which helps them subsequently survive.
Human children, in turn, as shown by observation using the latest "4D" ultrasound technology that Reed and his colleagues conducted five years ago, can hiccup, yawn, swallow and other things that were previously considered impossible for unborn children. …
This discovery led Reed and his team to look for other signs of "meaningful" actions in the prenatal behavior of infants. To carry out this experiment, the scientists secured the consent of four dozen expectant mothers, who agreed to undergo an unusual ultrasound examination in the laboratory of scientists from Lancaster University.
As part of this study, biologists first localized the position of the baby's head in the womb, and then illuminated it with several laser beams, imitating various figures with their help, including a schematic representation of a human head and a triangle. Then they began to shift the laser points and watched whether the embryo was turning its head with them, following the "face" or triangle.
These observations showed that infants turned their heads several times more often with a schematic face than with a triangle, which speaks in favor of the fact that they are able to distinguish the shapes of objects and respond to faces even before leaving the womb.
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“There is a possibility that the fetus simply finds this figure more interesting than other stimuli. But then he would have reacted just as actively to the “upside down” face, which in fact does not happen. Therefore, we can say that embryos can react to human faces in the same way as babies do,”the biologist continues.
Such a discovery, as Reed notes, suggests that the psychological development and actual life of a child begins even before he leaves the womb. In the near future, scientists are going to understand whether other abilities of babies, including the ability to distinguish the number of objects, are characteristic of embryos. Studying this issue, according to biologists, will help us understand when a child's "independent" development begins and how it proceeds in the womb.