PSYCH319

Lecture Two: Fetal gif

Fetal Development, Part Two
Prof. Vincent Reid • The best gif that you will see today*
vincent.reid@waikato.ac.nz – *…in the fetal development category
• http://tabletopwhale.com/img/posts/12-16-
14.gif
• At the least, it gives you a good idea of the
rapid changes involved in fetal development
• Can you spot anything that isn’t quite right?

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8 months

Learning Objectives

• Understand some aspects of fetal sensory

development
– Balance (proprioception), hearing, taste/smell
• Understand the primary methods used to
assess prenatal development
– Including prenatal to postnatal HAS methods
• Know how ultrasound works
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General view of fetal

Organised embryonic behaviours
– 8-12 weeks: Kicking feet, bending arms, forming
fists, curling toes, sucking thumb, open mouth,
expand and contract lungs, yawning
– At 8 weeks, sensitivities in feet, hands and mouth
development (Alberts, 1984)
At birth, the sensory systems are not on equal
footing: the onset of function does not occur
at the same time in prenatal development
(Gottlieb, 1971)

Tactile>vestibular>chemical>auditory>visual

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 Fetal Sensation of Motion
Fetal Taste and Smell
“proprioception”
– Week 8, neural innervation; week 16, taste buds on
the tongue; 9 weeks olfactory cells; 30 weeks
– Sense of balance at 5 months (20 weeks)
internal nasal passage clearance
– Evidence from rocking studies and fetal
– Maternal food alters the “flavour” of amniotic
counterbalance of position behaviours (Lickliter &
Bahrick, 2016) fluid
– Some evidence that broad maternal food selection
– Suggests key aspect of vestibular system is intact
engenders broad food consumption (correlational
at this age (linked to auditory development in
general; ossification of inner ear bones in design: Mennella et al., 2001)
gestational week 20) – Sensitivities to sweet over other tastes prenatally
• Poor at detecting salty tastes, even after birth

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Auditory development
High Amplitude Sucking Paradigms
and language research

• Responds to external stimuli at 5 months 1. Infant sucks on a dummy

– Fetal deafness if not protected 2. Baseline high amplitude sucking rate is determined during a 1-minute silent
period.
• Babies like listening to Mummy’s voice (DeCasper & Fifer, 1980) 3. Presentation of sound stimulus is made contingent on rate of high-amplitude
• Babies remember stories read to them in the womb sucking:
(DeCasper & Spence 1986) - Criterion sucks result in presentation of one speech stimulus.
• Babies like listening to the language they heard in the Habituation paradigm:
womb (Mehler et al., 1988) 1. When infant habituates to stimulus, stimulus changes for infants in
• Internal noises are heard English! Mum! Cat in the Hat! experimental condition.
2. Differences in sucking rate in the post-shift period for infants in the
more easily (e.g., mother’s
experimental vs. control conditions is used to assess infant's sensitivity to
voice) stimulus differences.

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Evidence for Fetal Learning Ultrasound imaging: What does it look like?

• Mothers read The Cat in a Hat by

Dr. Seuss, 2x/day for last 1½
months of pregnancy
• Method: Changes in rate of
sucking turned on or off a tape
recorder of mother reading (half
read that story, the other half
another story)
• Finding: Infants modified their
rates of sucking in the direction
that produced the familiar story
DeCasper & Spence, 1986

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 Ultrasound imaging: How does it work? Ultrasound imaging: How does it work?

• An ultrasound element acts like

a bat.
• Emit ultrasound and detect
echoes
• Map out boundary of object
• Now put many elements together to make a probe and create an
image

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Ultrasound imaging: development of a pregnancy Ultrasound imaging: fetal feet

24 weeks

This is a 2D ultrasound scan We can process the image in a

through the foot of a fetus. You can computer to find the outline of the foot.
8 weeks gestation (out of a 40 week pregnancy) see some of the bones of the foot. This is called surface rendering. Here,
the foot has been surface rendered
18 weeks

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Ultrasound imaging: more surface rendering

Image Quality Improvement
Gray-Scale
2D

1965 1985

3D, 4D
1995 2008

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 4D Imaging
• 3d ultrasound plus
movement (the 4th
dimension)
• High frequency
resonance means
limited time for use
(British Ultrasound GE Loqig 9 3D image of fetal
Society) twins
www.rrvr.net\3d.htm

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