The Development of Sensory Skills in Infants Hearing Although infant hearing fails to match the development of adult hearing,

your baby still has a well-developed sense of hearing at birth. Not only does your little one recognize and prefer your voice at birth, but she also can distinguish between sounds, quickly developing a preference for familiar sounds, including those that occur frequently in your spoken language. Having conversations with your little one and regularly speaking in your baby's presence plays a key role in helping her develop essential language skills. Sight Your infant's sight is the least developed sense when he is born, but development progresses rapidly during his first few years of life. Initially, infants prefer to look at areas showing contrasts between light and dark, which explains your little one's obvious interest in gazing at your face. The American Optometric Association states that during the first four months of life, your baby can focus at a distance of about 8 to 12 inches, gradually developing the ability to use his eyes in conjunction with the rest of his body during the remainder of the first year of life by learning and practicing skills such as picking up objects and judging distances. Smell The amniotic fluid surrounding your unborn baby allows him to develop a keen sense of smell even before his birth. This early smell development allows her to respond to smells in an adult-type fashion just hours after birth. According to Cindy McGaha, associate professor of child development at

Appalachian State University, infants turn away from unpleasant odors, such as rotten eggs, and choose to smile at pleasant odors, such as bananas. Your infant also quickly develops a marked preference for certain smells, including the smell of a nursing woman, as well as your scent itself. Amniotic fluid or liquor amnii is the nourishing and protecting liquid contained by the amniotic sac of a pregnant woman. Taste Taste development for your infant actually began around your seventh week of pregnancy when your unborn baby's taste buds first arrived. The amniotic fluid swirling around her body provided a liquid full of different tastes. After birth, your infant shows an initial preference for sweet tastes, which explains the practice of giving fussy infants sugar water. With regard to other tastes, infants typically indicate a dislike for sour tastes and fail to respond to salty flavors until around 4 months of age, at which point many babies start to show a preference for foods and substances containing salt. Touch Providing a foundation for other key skills such as cognitive development and parent-child attachment, touch plays a key role in promoting your infant's physical and social well-being. At birth, your little one reacts to pain in a similar fashion to you, and those who are touched in a pleasant fashion (stroking instead of poking) spend less time crying, choosing instead to smile and make more eye contact. Exploring the types of touch that your infant prefers (massage, tickling, bouncing) provides an easy opportunity to improve your little one's healthy development

Description A schema is a mental structure we use to organize and simplify our knowledge of the world around us. We have schemas about ourselves, other people, mechanical devices, food, and in fact almost everything. Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. It is acquired by the human infants between 8 and 12 months of age via the process of logical induction to help them develop secondary schemes in their sensori-motor coordination. This step is the essential foundation of the memory and the memorization process. In Assimilation, what is perceived in the outside world is incorporated into the internal world. If you are familiar with databases, you can think of it this way: your mind has its database already built, with its fields and categories already defined. If it comes across new information which fits into those fields, it can assimilate it without any trouble. In Accommodation, the internal world has to accommodate itself to the evidence with which it is confronted and thus adapt to it, which can be a more difficult and painful process. In the database analogy, it is like what happens when you try to put in information which does not fit the pre-existent fields and categories. You have to develop new ones to accommodate the new information. In reality, both are going on at the same time, so thatjust as the mower blade cuts the grass, the grass gradually blunts the bladealthough most of the time we are assimilating familiar material in the world around us, nevertheless, our minds are also having to adjust to accommodate it.