Final answer:
Newborn infants show a preference for faces and their mother's voice, highlighting early social and communication preferences. Their strong sense of smell enables them to recognize their mother's scent. As they grow, they advance in sensory, cognitive, and language development, evidencing increased visual acuity and verbal skills like making two-syllable sounds by six months.
Step-by-step explanation:
Sensory Abilities of Newborn Infants
Young infants exhibit significant sensory abilities, albeit not fully developed. Vision in newborns is the least mature, but they show a preference for faces from an early age, suggesting innate social attraction. In terms of auditory senses, infants prefer the sound of human voices over non-speech sounds and exhibit a stronger preference for their mother's voice, which indicates early language and communication development. Experiments have discovered that newborns suck more vigorously on pacifiers playing their mother's voice, showcasing an ingrained response to maternal sounds (Mills & Melhuish, 1974).
Moreover, newborns possess a strong sense of smell; they can distinguish their own mother's scent very early on, as evidenced by MacFarlane's (1978) study with breastfed infants. This helps them in seeking comfort and nourishment, which are critical survival behaviors at such a tender phase of life.
As infants grow, their sensory capabilities, along with cognitive and physical development, advance accordingly. By six months, near-adult vision acuity, color recognition, and depth perception start to emerge. These milestones contribute significantly to infants’ dynamic interaction with their environment and further language development as they begin to make two-syllable sounds like "mama" and "dada".