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Infant Vision

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Unlike many of the other sensory systems, the visual system – from the eye to neural circuits - of a human develops largely after birth. At birth, the visual structures are fully present however immature in their potentials. For example, the distance from the cornea at the front of the infant’s eye to the retina which is at the back of eye is 16-17mm at birth, 20 to 21 mm at 1 year, and 23-25 mm in adolescence and adulthood. [1]. This results in smaller retinal images for infants. Another fundamental physical change that occurs is with pupil dimensions. In regards to pupil dimensions, newborns pupil grow from being approximately 2.2 mm compared to an adult length of 3.3 mm. [2] From the first moment of life, there are a few innate components of their visual system. Newborns can detect changes in brightness, distinguish between stationary verses kinetic objects, and follow kinetic objects in their visual field. Due to infants inability to verbally express their visual field, growing research in this field relays heavy on non-verbal cues including infants perceived ability to detect patterns and changes. The major components of the visual system can be broken up into visual acuity, depth perception, color sensitivity, and light sensitivity.

Features of Infant Vision

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Visual acuity

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Vision Acuity

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Visual acuity, the sharpness of the eye to fine detail, is a major component of a human’s visual system. It requires not only the muscles of the eye – the ciliary muscles – to be able to focus on a particular object through contraction and relaxation, but other parts of the retina such of the fovea to project a clear image on the retina. The ciliary muscles start to strength from birth to two months, at which point infants have a control of that their visual muscle. . However, images still appear unclear at two months due to other components of the visual system such as the fovea and retina and the brain are poorly developed. This means that even though an infant is able to focus on a clear image on the retina, the fovea and other visual parts of the brain are too immature to transmit a clear image. Visual acuity in newborns is very limited as well compared to adults – being 12 to 25 times worse than that of a normal adult (Dobson & Teller 1978, Norcia & Tyler 1985). The vision of infants under one month of age ranges from 20/800 to 20/200. [3]By two months, visual acuity improves to 20/150. By 4 months, acuity improves by a factor of 2 – calculating to be 20/60 vision. As the infant grows, the acuity reaches the normal adult standard of 20/20 at 6 months. [4] One major method used to measure visual acuity during infancy is by testing an infant’s sensitivity to visual details such as a set of black strip lines in a pictorial image. Studies have shown that most one week old infants can discriminate a gray field from a fine black stripped field at a distance of 1 foot away. [5] This means that most infants will look longer at patterned visual stimuli instead of a plain, pattern-less stimuli. [6]. Gradually, infants develop the ability to distinguish strips of line that are closer together. Therefore, by measuring the wideth of the strips and their distance from an infant’s eye, visual acuity can be estimated, with detection of finer strips indicating better acuity. When examining an infants preferred visual stimuli, it was found that one month old infants often gazed mostly at prominent, sharp features of an object – whether it’s a strong defined curve or an edge. [7] Beginning at two month old infants, infants began to direct their saccades to the interior of the object, but still focusing on strong features. [8] [9]

Visual Acuity and Faces

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Newborns are exceptionally capable of face discrimination and recognition shortly after birth. [10]. Therefore it is not surprising that infants develop a strong facial recognition for their mother’s face. Studies have shown that a newborn have a preference for their mother’s face after 2 weeks of birth. At 2 weeks, infants would focus their visual attention on pictures of their own mother for a longer period, than a complete stranger. [11]. A more recent study has shown that even as early as 4 days old look longer at their mothers’ face than at those of strangers only when the mother is not wearing a head scarf. This may suggest that hairline and outer perimeter of the face play an integral part in the newborn’s face recognition. [12]/ According to Maurer and Salapateck, a 1-month old baby spans the outer contour of the face, with some interested in the eyes, while a 2-month old scans more broadly and focus on the features of the face, including the eyes and month. [13] When comparing facial features across species, it was found that infants of 6-months were better at distinguishing facial information of both humans and monkeys than older infants and adults. They found that both 9-month old and adults could discriminate between pictures of human faces; however, neither infant nor adult had the same capabilities when it came to pictures of money. On the other hand, 6 month old infants were able to discriminate both facial features on human faces and on monkey faces. This suggests that there is a narrowing in face processing, as a result of neural network changes in early cognition. Another explanation is that infants, likely have no experience with monkey faces and relatively little experience with human faces. This may result into 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 constant social interactions are human faces, have fined tuned their sensitivity to facial information of humans – which has lead to cortical specialization. [14]

Color Sensitivity

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Color sensitivity improves steadily over the first year of life for humans due to strengthening of the cones of the eyes. Like adults, infants have can make chromatic discrimination using three retinal photoreceptor types – long- (L) [reds & oranges] , mid- (M) [greens & yellows] and short- (S) [ blues & violets] wavelength cones. These cones recombine in the precortical visual processing to form a luminance channel and two chromatic channels that help an infant to see color and brightness. The particular pathway used for color discrimination is the parvocellular pathway. [15] There is a general debate among researchers in regards to the exact time that infants can detect different colors/chromatic stimuli due to important color factors such as brightness/luminance, saturation, and hue. Regardless of exact timeline to when infants see particular colors, it is understood among researcher that infants color sensitivity improves with age.

It is generally accepted across all researchers that infants prefer high contrast, bold colors at their earlier stages of infancy, over less saturated colors. [16]One study found that newborn infants looked longer at checkered patterns of white and colored stimuli (including red, green, yellow) than they did at uniform white color. However, infants failed to discriminate blue from white checkered patterns. [17] 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 deferred in their color preference. Newborns and 1-month did not show any preference among the colored stimuli. It was found that 3- 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. According this study, it was suggest that infants had a general preference for colored stimuli over non-colored stimuli at birth; however, infants were not able to distinguish between the different colored stimuli until after third months of age. [18]

Recent research into the development of color vision using infant monkeys indicates that color experience is critical for normal vision development. Infant monkey were place in a room with monochromatic lighting limiting their access to normal spectrum of colors for a one month period. After a 1 year period, the monkey’s ability to distinguish colors was poorer than that of normal monkey exposed to full spectrum of colors. Although this result directly pertains to infant monkeys and not humans, they strongly suggest that visual experience with color is critical for proper, healthy vision development in humans as well. [19]

Depth Perception

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To perceive depth, infants as well as adults rely on several signals such as distances and kinetics. For instances, the fact that objects closer to the observer fill more space in our visual field than farther objects provides some cues into depth perception for infants. Evidence has shown that newborn’s eyes do not work in the same fashion as older children or adults – mainly due to poor coordination of the eyes. Newborn’s eyes move in the same direction only about half of the time. [20] Strength of eye muscle control is positively correlated to achieve depth perception. Human eyes are formed in such a way that each eye reflects a stimulus at a slightly different angle thereby producing two images that are processed in the brain. These images provide the essential visual important regarding 3D features of the external world. Therefore, an infant’s ability to control his eye movement and converge on one object is critical for developing depth perception. Infants who are cross eyes, an innate condition called convergent strabismus, fail to produce proper depth perception if their condition is not surgically fixed with surgery.

Development

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One of the groundbreaking discoveries of infant depth perception is thanks to researchers Gibson and Walk. [21]Gibson and Walk developed an apparatus called the visual cliff that could be used to investigate visual depth perception in infants. In short, infants were placed on a centerboard to one side which contained an illusory steep drop (“deep side”) and another which contained a platform of the centerboard (“shallow side”). In reality, both sides, covered in glass, was safe for infants to trek. From their experiment, Gibson and Walk found that a majority of infants ranging from 6-14 months old would not cross from the shallow side to the deep side due to their innate sense of fear to heights. From this experiment, Gibson and Walk concluded that by 6 months an infant has developed a sense of depth. However, this experiment was limited to infants that could independently crawl or walk. [22] To overcome the limitations of testing non-locomotive infants, Campos and his colleges devised an experiment that was dependent on heart rate reactions of infants when placed in environments that reflected different depth sceneries. Campos and his collegues placed 6 week old infants on the “deep end” of the visual cliff, the 6 week old infant’s heart rate decreased and a sense of fascination was seen in the infants. However, when 7 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. Therefore, it could be concluded that sometime at the spark of crawling around 4-5 months, depth perception begins to strongly present itself. [23].

Depth Perception Cues

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From in infant 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. The convergence of each eye on a particular object and the stereopsis, also known as the retinal disparity among two objects, provide some information for infants older than 10 weeks. With binocular vision development, infants between 4 to 5 months also develop a sense of size and shape constancy objects, regardless of the objects location and orientation in space. [24] From static cue based on monocular vision, infants older than 7 months have the ability to predict depth perception from pictorial position of objects. In other words, edges of closer objects overlap objects in the distance. [25] Lastly, kinetic cues are another factor in depth perception for humans, especially young infants. Infants ranging from 3to 5 months are able to move when an object approaches them in the intent to hit them – implying that infants have depth perception. [26]

Light Sensitivity

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When determining the level of luminance of chromatic stimuli, researchers also found that newborns looked longer at stimuli of lower luminance.

Common Infant Vision Problems

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http://www.infantvision.org/

References

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  1. ^ (Hirano, S. Yamamoto, Y. Takayama, H. Sugata Y., & Matsuo, K. (1979) Ultrasonic observation of eyes in premature babies: Growth curves of ocular axial length and its components. Acta Societatis Opthalamologicae Japonicae, 83, 1679-1693.)
  2. ^ (Banks, M. S. & Salapateck, P. (1978). Acuity and contrast in 1- 2- 3- month old human infants. Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, 17, 361-365. )
  3. ^ Courage, M. L., & Adams, R. J. (1990) Visual Acuity assessment from birth to three years using the acuity car procedures: Cross-longitudinal samples. Optometry and vision science, 67, 713-718.
  4. ^ Sokol, Samuel. Measurement of infant visual acuity from pattern reversal evoked potentials. 18(1) 33-39.
  5. ^ Maurer, D. & Maurer, C. (1988) The world of the newborn. New York. Basic Books.
  6. ^ Snow, C. W. (1998) Infant development (2nd edition) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  7. ^ Bronson, G, W (1991). Infant differences in rate of visual encoding. Child Development , 62, 44-54.
  8. ^ Bronson G, W. Changes in infants’ visual scanning across the 2- to 14- week period. J Exp. Child Development. 1990 Feb; 49(1):101-25.
  9. ^ Maurer, D. & Salapatek, P. (1976) Developmental changes in the scanning of faces by young infants. Child Development, 47, 523-527.
  10. ^ Field TM, Cohen D, Garcia R, Greenberg R. (1984.) Mother-stranger face discrimination by the newborn. Infant Behavior and Development 7(1): 19–25.
  11. ^ I. W. R. Bushnell. Mother’s Face Recognition in Newborn Infants: Learning and Memory. (2001) Infant and Child Development 10: 67-74
  12. ^ Pascalis, O., De Schonen, S., Morton, J., Deruelle, C., & Fabre-Grenet, M. Mother’s face recognition by neonates: A replication and extension. Infant Behavior and Development, 18, 79-85.
  13. ^ Maurer, D. & Salapatek, P. Developmental changes in the scanning of faces by young infants. Child Development. (1976) 47, 523-27.
  14. ^ Pascalis, O., De Haan, M., Nelson, C. Is Face Processing Species-Specific During the First Year of Life? Science 17 May 2002: Vol. 296 no. 5571 pp. 1321-1323. DOI: 10.1126/science.1070223
  15. ^ Thomasson, M., & Teller. D. Infant color vision: sharp chromatic edges are not required for chromatic discrimination in 4-month-olds Vision Research 40 (2000) 1051–1057.
  16. ^ Teller, D. Y., Peeples, D. R. Sekel, M.. Discrimination of chromatic from white light by two month old human infants .Vision Research, 18 (1) (1978), pp. 41–48
  17. ^ Adams, T. J., Maurer, D., and Cahsin, H. A. (1990). The influence of stimulus size on newborns’ discrimination of chromatic from achromatic stimuli.
  18. ^ Adams, R., An evaluation of colored preference in early infancy. Infant Behavior and Development. 10(2): 143-150. (1987)
  19. ^ Sugita, Y. (2004) Experience in early infancy is indispensable for color perception. Current Biology 14, 1267-1271.
  20. ^ Kellman PJ, Banks MS. 1998. Infant visual perception. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 2: Cognition, Perception, and Language (1st edn), vol. 2, Kuhn D, Siegler RS (eds). Wiley: New York; 103–146.
  21. ^ Gibson, E.J.; Walk, R.D. (April 1960). "Visual Cliff". Scientific American.
  22. ^ Gibson, E.J.; Walk, R.D. (April 1960). "Visual Cliff". Scientific American.
  23. ^ Campos, J.J. Hiatt, S., Ramsay, D., Henderson, C., & Svejda, M. (1978). The emergence of fear on the visual cliff. The origins of affect. New York: Plenum.
  24. ^ Bornstein, M. & Lamb, M.. Developmental Psychology. 3rd Ed. 1992. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.
  25. ^ Fox, R., Aslin, R., Shea, S. L., & Dumais, S. (1980) Steropsis in human infants. Science, 207, 323-324.
  26. ^ Bornstein, M. & Lamb, M.. Developmental Psychology. 3rd Ed. 1992. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, NJ.
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