Show the way

Is children's behaviour driven by what they experience, or are they born with it? Professor Tricia David continues our series on experts' theories about child development Babies in the womb eavesdrop on life outside it. Researchers now tell us that they seem to come into the world already primed to be social, to want human interaction. They prefer looking at faces, or patterns that seem like faces; they can recognise familiar voices, especially their mothers'; and they can recognise the sounds and speech patterns of the languages they overheard before birth.