Infant visual development
The neuro-pathway and physical changes that underlie these improvements in vision remain a strong focus in research.
By providing a better understanding of the visual system, future medical treatments for infant and pediatric ophthalmology can be established.
By additionally creating a timeline on visual perception development in "normal" newborns and infants, research can shed some light on abnormalities that often arise and interfere with ideal sensory growth and change.
The muscles that initiate movement start to strengthen from birth to 2 months, at which point infants have control of their eye.
However, images still appear unclear at two months due to other components of the visual system like the fovea and retina and the brain circuitry that are still in their developmental stages.
[9][10] Additionally, infants starting from one month of age have been found to prefer visual stimuli that are in motion rather than stationary.
This suggests that there is a narrowing in face processing, as a result of neural network changes in early cognition.
This may result in a more broadly tuned face recognition system and, in turn, an advantage in recognizing facial identity in general (i.e., regardless of species).
In contrast, healthy adults due to their interaction with people on a frequent basis have fine tuned their sensitivity to facial information of humans – which has led to cortical specialization.
Therefore, an infant's ability to control their eye movement and converge on one object is critical for developing depth perception.
From this experiment, Gibson and Walk concluded that by six months an infant has developed a sense of depth.
However, when seven month-old infants were lowered down on the same “deep end” illusion, their heart rates accelerated rapidly and they started to whimper.
Gibson and Walk concluded that infants had developed a sense of visual depth prior to beginning locomotion.
[19] From an infant's standpoint, depth perception can be inferred using three means: binocular, static, and kinetic cues.
As mentioned previous, humans are binocular and each eye views the external world with a different angle – providing essential information into depth.
[20] From static cues based upon monocular vision, infants older of five month of age have the ability to predict depth perception from pictorial position of objects.
[22] Lastly, kinetic cues are another factor in depth perception for humans, especially young infants.
[20] Color vision improves steadily over the first year of life for humans due to strengthening of the cones of the eyes.
[citation needed] Like adults, infant color vision derives from three cone cell types with long-, mid- and short-wavelength opsins that are sensitive to different parts of the visible range.
Infant monkeys were placed in a room with monochromatic lighting limiting their access to a normal spectrum of colors for a one-month period.
