Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff. From how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb Here, it might seem like fetuses are
Speaker 1: up to all that much other than growing in the cozy,
Speaker 1: warm environment that is their mother's womb. And I mean
Speaker 1: growing from a bundle of cells into an independently living,
Speaker 1: breathing human being is a big enough job. However, research
Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Current Biology shows that third
Speaker 1: trimester fetuses have vision capabilities much more advanced than previously thought,
Speaker 1: and further, they can choose what they want to look at.
Speaker 1: Researchers from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom were keen
Speaker 1: on expanding the understanding of fetal site capabilities. We spoke
Speaker 1: via email with Vincent Read, the lead researcher and a
Speaker 1: professor of psychology. He said, we've been able to explore
Speaker 1: the use of all the fetal senses except for vision
Speaker 1: up until now. There's a lot that we know about
Speaker 1: newborn babies and their vision, but almost nothing with fetuses.
Speaker 1: Just before they're born. The newborn is very good at
Speaker 1: processing faces and prefers to look it faces over any
Speaker 1: other shape. So it was logical to explore the development
Speaker 1: of this preference before birth. The researchers examined a total
Speaker 1: of thirty nine fetuses. There would have been more, but
Speaker 1: some of the babies were in deep sleep because they
Speaker 1: apparently missed the memo about participating in a research study,
Speaker 1: while other tests experienced poor image quality. The fetuses ranged
Speaker 1: in gestational age from two hundred and thirty one to
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty two days that's about thirty three
Speaker 1: to thirty six weeks. Site is the final sense to
Speaker 1: develop inside the womb, with eyes staying closed until around
Speaker 1: just stational week twenty eight. This is because fetal retinas
Speaker 1: aren't developed until that point. Oh and all of the
Speaker 1: babies were singletons. No twins or multiple pregnancies were studied.
Speaker 1: Because the safety and comfort of the fetal participants and
Speaker 1: their mothers was of utmost importance, the researchers designed noninvasive
Speaker 1: attempts to assess the baby's visual capabilities. To do so,
Speaker 1: the scientists shown lights through the maternal tissue. Read explained
Speaker 1: the light consisted of three dots. When these are arranged
Speaker 1: to represent two the eyes and one for the mouth.
Speaker 1: Newborn babies prefer to look at them more than anything else,
Speaker 1: so we didn't show fetuses of face, but an image
Speaker 1: that was face like. The researchers used for the ultrasound
Speaker 1: to measure if and how much the fetuses turned their
Speaker 1: heads in response to the stimuli. They also showed the
Speaker 1: same three dot pattern, but inverted so it didn't resemble
Speaker 1: a face in structure to the fetuses. As it turns out,
Speaker 1: non facelike dots weren't as appealing. Read noted that newborns
Speaker 1: don't find these configurations very interesting either. Although subtle attraction
Speaker 1: to the face like configuration of three dots makes a
Speaker 1: big difference in what we understand about developing site, Reid said,
Speaker 1: it means we have this preference even before we're born.
Speaker 1: It's either due to being innate or due to experiences
Speaker 1: prior to birth. Another major finding of this research is
Speaker 1: that it moves up the human visual timeline. Reid said,
Speaker 1: we now know that the fetus actively engages with visual
Speaker 1: information in the prenatal environment. The head movement was a
Speaker 1: deliberate movement to track the stimuli that we presented. This
Speaker 1: means that we can now look at many other aspects
Speaker 1: of fetal vision. The study has laid the groundwork for
Speaker 1: future delving into fetal vision because as it stands right now,
Speaker 1: little is known about how much fetuses can see. Red said,
Speaker 1: a week old infant has very poor focal vision. It's
Speaker 1: all blurred. The same will be true for fetus a
Speaker 1: few weeks before birth. We know that premature infants can
Speaker 1: see shapes, lights, and details, but that's once they are born,
Speaker 1: and it could be that the prenatal environment is different.
Speaker 1: We need to find that out. Reed's group plans to
Speaker 1: investigate whether fetuses can discriminate between quantities or numbers, which
Speaker 1: he notes is something that newborns can do. He said,
Speaker 1: if the fetus can do this too, this tells us
Speaker 1: a lot about fetal cognitive abilities. We're also keen to
Speaker 1: look at how the fetus sees motion. Babies prefer to
Speaker 1: look at animate or biological motion. If the fetus has
Speaker 1: this preference, this would suggest that experiences they have had
Speaker 1: engaging with their own body may have given rise to
Speaker 1: these preferences. Today's episode was written by Ali A. Hoyt
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more on this and lots of other developing topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet how stuff Works dot com and
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