New research uncovers greater insights into baby consciousness 

Consciousness – that is, the subjective experience of the mind and the world – is something which is often studied in adults, in people with mental health disorders, and sometimes even in animals. 

Until recently, however, consciousness in newborn infants was rarely studied, and poorly understood. While scientists knew that babies blink, cry, and yawn—and a few weeks into their lives, they might smile, they were unsure if these movements meant that newborns have conscious experiences of perceiving the world around them.

“We still don’t have a final answer, but new evidence has contributed to an increasing consensus that consciousness starts early, in contrast with other theories that claim we need more cognitive development and brain maturation for babies to become conscious,” Assistant Professor of bioethics Claudie Passos-Ferreira said. 

AP Passos-Ferreira, who works at the NYU School of Global Public Health said this new evidence for consciousness relies on methods that creatively measure brain activity in newborns, which is not an easy task. Infants can’t respond to verbal cues or directions and sleep quite a bit, making their minds difficult to study.

“Neuroscientists often describe the infant brain and behavior as very noisy—it’s difficult to extract information, and what’s going on is not as clear as in adults,” she explained. 

Instead, scientists used recent studies which measure babies’ brain activity and eye movement, with AP Passos-Ferreira’s new article in the journal Neuron discussing the novel ways that scientists gauge whether babies are conscious: measuring brainwave responses to unexpected sounds, using imaging to evaluate the brain’s networks, and tracking eye movements such as blinks and pupil changes to see how babies react to different stimuli. 

The studies show that cognitive processes related to consciousness may begin functioning in babies earlier than had been previously thought.

“My previous work focused on the self and morality and how these things develop. I realised that there had not been much progress in philosophical discussions about the early stages of when we become conscious. So, I moved my research and now I’m focusing on when and how our conscious mind develops,” she explained. 

“Are there stages at which we acquire different cognitive abilities, and does this change the type of conscious experience we have? For example, when babies acquire a language, it changes the way they reason—but what does this mean for how they consciously experience the world and their bodies?”

Read AP Passos-Ferreira’s new work here. For a Q&A session with NYU about her work, see here.