Prenatal (rat): Most of the development for rats in utero is primarily related to exposure to

sensory-motor development. Rats in the womb learn to detect external cues, such as tilting,
which is comparable to maternal rearing or circling, vibrations caused by intrauterine events
during maternal grooming, or mechanical compression to match the contraction of the uterus
during labor. These cues are to some extent an indication that the fetuses will respond/function
properly; e.g. they will recognize licking at birth because they were exposed to stroking
sensations before. Its important for fetuses to maintain movement in utero; a lack of such
movement can lead to reduced joint flexibility, and disruptions in early swallowing or respiratory
actions can impair their gastrointestinal and pulmonary development.

Early postnatal (rat): One thing that is crucial to the survival of newborn rats is species
recognition. Newborn rats have very poor eyesight, and they cant walk very far on their own
legs or regulate their core body temperatures effectively, so the only way they can survive after
birth is to crawl under the mother and attach to a nipple in order to feed on it. It appears that
olfactory cues are involved in the process of finding the mothers nipples; exposure to the
mothers amniotic fluid imprints the memory of the smell on the pups, and combining the
prenatal and postnatal experiences allows for the pups to better identify the nipples; on the
other hand, washing the nipples causes a drop in the number of rats who begin suckling.

Prenatal (human): Before infants come out of the womb, human fetuses spend time inside their
mothers listening to all kinds of noises, whether they be human voices or otherwise. It seems
that auditory preferences held by an infant after birth are influenced by the noises that it may or
may not have heard before birth. Prenatal babies are constantly exposed to the sound of the
maternal heartbeat, stomach noises, and even the maternal voice on the inside. What they
didnt hear as often was the paternal voice. In the communication domain, the voices that the
child is exposed to in the prenatal stages affects its preference for certain peoples voices after
birth. Also, listening to certain forms of media for a sufficient amount of time in the womb
suggests a developed preference for those same media in the early stages of infancy.

Early postnatal (human): In terms of the sensory-motor capabilities that are available to
relatively new infants, one of the main things that is correlated with higher learning is the ability
to coordinate ones motor skills with the physical tasks at hand. When it comes to defining the
structure of objects or distributing them into different categories, children who had more
experience playing around with said objects (e.g. holding, grabbing, or even putting them in their
mouths) exhibited more change in the processes of their visual attention. These changes could
potentially be part of how children develop deeper understandings and discernments of physical
objects; for instance, if given enough time to play with certain objects, children are able to
categorize objects based on the direction and span of some perceived major axis, as well as
whether objects exhibited some degree of rotational symmetry.