Womb with a view: Fetuses can recognize faces
We know babies love looking at the faces of their mom or dad. Researchers discovered that this preference develops in the womb several weeks before birth, according to a study published Thursday.
By projecting light through the uterine wall of pregnant mothers, British scientists found that 34-week-old fetuses would turn their heads to look at face-like images.
“We have shown the fetus can distinguish between different shapes, preferring to track facelike over non-face-like shapes,” said psychologist Vincent Reid of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, a co-author of the study. “This preference has been recognized in babies for many decades, but until now, exploring fetal vision has not been attempted.”
The findings, which appeared in the journal Current Biology, were the first to show it’s possible to explore sight and cognition in babies before birth.
Researchers projected two patterns of three dots in the shape of a triangle through the uterine wall of 39 pregnant mothers: One was in the shape of eyes and a mouth and the other was upside down.
Scientists then measured how the fetus responded using highquality, 4-D ultrasound.
The ultrasound showed developing babies turned their heads to look more often at upright, face-like stimuli than those presented to them upside down.
“It turned out that they responded in a way that was very similar to infants,” Reid said.
Although fetuses’ eyes are likely to be closed most of the time, the ultrasound scans often showed them blinking.