Final answer:
where infants as young as 12 hours old spend more time looking at their mother's face than a stranger's. Infants prefer their mother's voice and scent and start to show social responses around 6 weeks. Recognition and discrimination abilities enhance as their sensory and cognitive development progresses throughout the first year.
Step-by-step explanation:
As early as 12 hours after birth, infants spend more time looking at their mother's face than at a stranger's face.
Newborn infants have senses that are still developing, with vision being the least developed at birth. Despite this, newborns demonstrate a preference for faces and particularly their mother's face shortly after birth. Infants are capable of recognizing their mother's voice and her scent, and they show a distinct preference for her. Studies have shown that newborns can match voices to faces and prefer their mother's voice over that of strangers. By 6 weeks, infants typically start to smile and make vocal sounds, indicating the early stages of social engagement and communication. During the first year, as their sensory and cognitive abilities develop, they become better able to distinguish characteristics such as color and depth, which play roles in face recognition and discrimination between different faces.
Regarding the ability to discriminate between different ethnic groups, it is not until closer to one year of age that infants show more pronounced abilities to discriminate among the phonemes used in the languages of their environments, which may relate to recognizing and distinguishing between faces of different ethnic groups. Therefore, statement B reflects a developmental milestone that occurs later than the ability for newborns to show a preference for their mother's face.