Blackwell Reference Online

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A recurring question posed by parents to pediatricians and vision researchers is, “What can my baby see?” With the vast amount of research on infant visual development accumulated over the past 25 years, we can now provide them with a reasonably complete account of what their infant can see at different ages, as described in this chapter. This summary shows that a remarkable amount of visual development occurs over the first year of life, but all visual functions do not mature at the same rate. Although the developmental course of many visual functions is known, we still know little about the development of more global aspects of perception, such as object recognition and image segmentation. Further research, including consolidation and modeling of existing data, will be necessary to explain how the infant is able to integrate all of the low-level information into a coherent view of the world. Unbelievable as it may be to a new generation of vision researchers, many of the techniques in standard use today, both in the laboratory and the clinic, did not exist when they were infants. Preferential looking (PL) is one of the oldest and among the most widely used today. The technique is based on the observation that infants prefer some stimuli over others (e.g., stripes over plain gray). In the original preferential looking paradigm of Fantz (1961) , an infant was given a choice between ... log in or subscribe to read full text