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With the increasing emphasis on treating autism and other disorders in infants (JW Psychiatry Nov 1 2010), the question arises whether babies have conscious awareness of their surroundings rather than unconsciously and reflexively responding to environmental inputs.
Adults who see two pictures consecutively, with the first one seen very briefly, experience “visual masking,” in which awareness of the first picture vanishes. Electrophysiologic recordings during masking show a linear pattern lasting 300 ms during the “unconscious” first image, followed by a complex response pattern to the consciously seen second image. The authors hypothesized that this experiment would produce similar results in infants, thus demonstrating that infants have co…