When Do Babies Become Conscious?

Just so you know, this picture should not raise any ethical questions. 

Hopefully, your baby is always breathing (here, I mean baby as in small child, not as in slang term for a person you may or may not be in an intimate relationship with), but when does it start being conscious of what is going on? Or even that anything is going on, and/or exists?

According to new research, at about 5 months.
In adults, there is a clear signal in the brain when it processes anything that goes on in the outside world, the spark of consciousness. In a recent experiment utilizing over 230 babies (that doesn't sound cruel), scientists looked for that same signal in baby's brains.

Babies that were one year old showed the same signal, but it was about three times slower than that in adults. Surprisingly, the signal also appeared in most 5 month olds, but it was even slower than that of one year olds. The scientists even speculate that it may appear in babies as young as 2 months, but they haven't seen it yet.
This means that by 5 months, most babies can process slow moving things and at least fully understand that that thing is moving, and exists.

Charles Kouider, a neuroscientist at Harvard, hopes to explore how these signals of consciousness connect to learning, especially language development. “We make the assumption that babies are learning very quickly and that they’re fully unconscious of what they learn,” Kouider says. “Maybe that’s not true.”

Check out the source for a longer look at the experiment.

[Source]