Why Are Babies Visually Stimulated by Black and White?
The Science Behind WuddlyWorld
Research has shown that babies prefer to look at black and white rather than bright colors or pastels.
This concept was first discovered by research done in the early 1960s by Dr. Robert Fanz, a developmental psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. A more recent 2006 study called “Infant Physical Development” by Dr. Craig Ron of Edinboro University (Pennsylvania) continues to show that an infant’s vision capabilities are for high contrast colors such as black and white.
Why is visual stimulation so important in those early months?
Out of the five senses vision is the least developed sense that a baby has at birth. This is due to a baby’s retina not being fully developed. The newborn retina only detects contrast between light and dark, or black and white. (www.askdrsears.com)
At birth the nerve cells in a baby’s brain are disorganized and not well connected. As the brain receives input from all five senses this causes nerve cells to multiply and form a multitude of connections with other nerve cells. This is why visual stimulation is so important. If a baby’s visual center on his brain is never stimulated, it would never develop and the optic nerve would shrivel up!
A smarter baby if visually stimulated by black and white images
Dr. Susan Ludington describes in her book How to Have a Smarter Baby that at first a baby’s fixation, or attention span, varies from 4-10 seconds. Many parents reported that their newborn’s attention span increased from 10 seconds to 60-90 seconds after only one week of looking at black and white images. Because of this, fixation helps learning. If your baby fixates on one object, the information about that object gets through to the cortex, the deepest part of the brain, which means that there is an intact pathway that stimulates brain growth.
The science shows that babies not only enjoy looking at black and white but the activity is also stimulating their development.