infant consciousness
sensory awareness, volitional action, and other aspects of phenomenal experience in newborns and older infants. Investigations of infant consciousness suggest that it begins in early gestation with the formation of anatomical, physiological, and neural structures that will serve an individual’s conscious experience in postnatal life; develops in late gestation into a fetus’s latent engagement with sensed surroundings in and ex utero; becomes nascently experienced in early postnatal life, as a newborn begins to explore the world outside his or her own body; and emerges increasingly as a distinct experience with the achievement of developmental milestones in later infancy and childhood.