The biography of a baby

by Milicent Washburn Shinn

I have said that this is not memory, yet there is in it a germ of memory. A past experience is brought back to consciousness; and if it were brought back as a definite idea, instead of a vague feeling, it would be memory.

Close on this came another great advance in vision. This was on the twenty-fifth day, toward evening, when the baby was lying on her grandmother’s knee by the fire, in a condition of high well-being and content, gazing at her grandmother’s face with an expression of attention. I came and sat down close by, leaning over the baby, so that my face must have come within the indirect range of her vision. At that she turned her eyes to my face and gazed at it with the same appearance of attention, and even of some effort, shown by a slight tension of brows and lips, then turned her eyes back to her grandmother’s face, and again to mine, and so several times. The last time she seemed to catch sight of my shoulder, on which a high light struck from the lamp, and not only moved her eyes, but threw her head far back to see it better, and gazed for some time, with a new expression on her face—“a sort of dim and rudimentary eagerness,” says my note. She no longer stared, but really looked.

Clear seeing, let us here recall, is not done with the whole retina, but only with a tiny spot in the centre, the so-called “yellow spot,” or “macula lutea.” If the image of an object falls to one side of this, especially if it is far to one side, we get only a shapeless impression that something is there; we “catch a glimpse of it,” as we say. In order really to look at it we turn our eyeballs toward the object till the image falls on the spot of clear vision. We estimate the distance through which to turn the balls, down to minute fractions of an inch, by the feeling in the eye muscles.

This was what the baby had done, and I do not dare to say how many philosophical and psychological discussions are involved in her doing it. Professor Le Conte thinks that it shows an inborn sense of direction, since the eyes are turned, not toward the side on which the ray strikes the retina, but toward the side from which the ray enters the eye; that is, the baby thinks out along the line of the ray to the object it comes from, thus putting the object outside himself, in space, as we do. Professor Wundt, the great German psychologist, is positive that the baby has no sense of space or direction, but gains it by just such measurements with the eye muscles; that there is no right nor left, up nor down, for him, but only associations between the look of things off at one side, and the feel of the eye action that brings them to central vision.

This means that before a baby can carry the eye always through just the right arc to look at an object, he must have made this association between the look of things and the feel of the action separately for each point of the retina. It is a great deal for a baby to have learned in three weeks; still, babies have to learn fast if they are ever to catch up with the race; and in the early roamings of the eye they experience over and over all manner of transits of images to and fro across the retina. Probably, too, it was still only partially learned.

I watched now for what Preyer’s record had led me to expect as the next development in vision—the ability to follow a moving object with the eyes; that is, to hold the yellow spot fixed on the object as it moved, moving the eyeball in time with it in order to do so. I used my hand to move to and fro before the baby, and could not satisfy myself that she followed it, though she sometimes seemed to; but the day after she was a month old I tried a candle, and her eyes followed it unmistakably; she even threw her head back to follow it farther. In trying this experiment, one should always use a bright object, should make sure the baby’s eyes are fixed on it, and then should move it very slowly indeed, right and left.

So far, there is no necessary proof of will. Longet found that the eyes and head of a pigeon whose cerebrum had been removed would follow a moving light. We ourselves can sit absorbed in thought or talk, yet follow unconsciously with our eyes the movement of a lantern along a dark road; and if something appears on the outer edge of our vision we often turn quite involuntarily to look. But the baby’s new expression of intelligence and interest showed that whether she willed the movements or not, she attended to the new impressions she was getting.

Professor Preyer noticed the same dawn of intelligence in his baby’s face at about the same stage. And it is worth while to observe that when I came to study my record I was surprised to find how often such an awakening look, an access of attention, wonder, or intelligence, in the baby’s face, had coincided with some marked step in development and signalized its great mental importance. I should advise any one who is observing a baby to be on the lookout for this outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual unfolding.

In both these visual developments the baby had proved able to use her neck in coöperation with her eyes, throwing back her head to see farther. It began at the same time to seem that she was really and deliberately trying to hold up her head for the same purpose of seeing better. She not only straightened it up more and more in the bath, but when she was laid against one’s breast she would lift her head from the shoulder, sometimes for twenty seconds at a time, and look about. Preyer sets this down as the first real act of will.

The baby’s increased interest in seeing centred especially on the faces about her, at which she gazed with rapt interest. Even during the period of mere staring, faces had oftenest held her eyes, probably because they were oftener brought within the range of her clearest seeing than other light surfaces. The large, light, moving patch of the human face (as Preyer has pointed out) coming and going in the field of vision, and oftener chancing to hover at the point of clearest seeing than any other object, embellished with a play of high lights on cheeks, teeth, and eyes, is calculated to excite the highest degree of attention a baby is capable of at a month old. So from the very first—before the baby has yet really seen his mother—her face and that of his other nearest friends become the most active agents in his development, and the most interesting things in his experience.