Educational Media Reviews Online

This engaging film explores the research being done on fetal and newborn sensory and psychological development. Divided into two parts, Prenatal Psychology and Postnatal Psychology, both follow scientists in Paris, France and at two universities in Canada as they uncover proof of fetal and neonatal responses to stimuli and direct connections with neurological development.

In Part 1, tests are conducted with pregnant women to determine how developed the senses of hearing, sight, and touch are in later term fetuses, along with memory development. Relying on fetal heart rate as an indicator of response, the intriguing experiments produce some remarkable results. The most dramatic being fetal reactions to light (flashlight held on the outside of the mother’s belly), to sound (music and voice), and to vibratory movements (mothers swaying to music). It appears that not only do fetuses respond to their mother’s voices, but also to music heard in utero, and they remember these sensory experiences, allowing them to adapt to life in the womb. The rhythmic patterns of language and music form the groundwork of our earliest memories.

Not only does the fetus remember sounds and vibratory responses while still in the womb, but they will respond to those same stimuli as a neonate as well. Part 2 of the film focuses on how the newborn organizes sensations into perceptions and how it adapts to both familiar and newer sensory information. Experiments are conducted with music, face recognition, and sleep patterns to try to determine how babies process all the stimuli in their new environments. As in Part 1, interesting results appear, and new insights are gained into neurological and psychological development of newborn humans.

The value of this film for higher education lies not only in the results gleaned from the research, but from also watching the experiments unfold. It will be most useful for undergraduate level psychology and health sciences programs. Most of the film is in French with English subtitles, although there are some portions with English narration. The film moves along at a reasonable pace except for some portions of Part 1 which are drawn out a bit too long with repetition of certain concepts, but overall The Secret Life of Babies is recommended for college and university human development collections.