It is generally accepted across all current research that infants prefer high contrast and bold colors at their earlier stages of infancy, rather than saturated colors. One study found that newborn infants looked longer at checkered patterns of white and colored stimuli (including red, green, yellow) than they did at a uniform white color. However, infants failed to discriminate blue from white checkered patterns. Another study – recording the fixation time of infants to blue, green, yellow, red, and gray at two difference luminance levels – found that infants and adults differed in their color preference. Newborns and one month did not show any preference among the colored stimuli. It was found that three-month-old infants preferred the longer wavelength (red and yellow) to the short-wavelength (blue and green) stimuli, while adults had the opposite. However, both adults and infants preferred colored stimuli over non-colored stimuli. This study suggested that infants had a general preference for colored stimuli over non-colored stimuli at birth, though infants were not able to distinguish the different colored stimuli prior to the age of three months.
