First Impressions: what can babies see? - Science Weekly Podcast

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What can we see when we’re born? How does this develop with time? And how can our culture and language affect the way we perceive the world around us?

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To celebrate the launch of the Guardian’s First Impressions: a virtual experience of the first year of life this week, Nicola Davis delves into infant vision and asks: what happens to our vision in the first six months of life? What capabilities are we born with? And what can insights into infant colour vision tell us about human cognition?

To help explore all this and more, Nicola speaks to leader of the Sussex Baby Lab and professor of visual perception and cognition, Anna Franklin to find out exactly what it is an infant can see. We also hear from the University of York psychologist Professor Alex Wade about the development of acuity and stereoscopic vision. And finally, we hear from the Surrey Baby Lab’s Dr Ally Grandison and Professor Asifa Majid from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, about the categorisation of colour by infants, and what this might tell us about the development of human cognition.

Catriona, four-months-old, with a Geodesic Sensornet on her head at the Baby Lab
Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian
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