LEARNING IN THE WOMB

LEARNING IN THE WOMB

 Experiences during the late prenatal period are certainly important, and perhaps vital for normal brain development. Learning can first be detected experimentally at about twenty-two to twenty-four weeks of gestation, when fetuses will respond to a noise or a touch but will ignore the same stimulus if it occurs repeatedly – a simple kind of memory called habituation. From around thirty weeks fetuses show conditioning – a more complex kind of memory in which an arbitrary stimulus can be learned as a signal that something will happen, like a sound signalling a poke. Fetal memories for particular pieces of music and the mother’s voice and smell have all been shown to form sometime after thirty weeks’ gestation and to persist after birth.