Vision

The human infant’s visual system provides a crucial means of exploring and reacting to the environment (Slater & Johnson, 1998). Although newborns’ visual acuity is less than perfect, they can certainly take in a great deal of visual information, and they soon show signs of pursuing it actively (von Hofsten, 2001). If you hold an object about 30 cm from a neonate’s face, he can focus on it and may track it if you move it slowly from side to side. At this stage, the baby’s visual attention is likely to be concentrated on the object’s edges, but over the next few weeks he will begin to explore its whole surface (Aslin, 1987). Within the first couple of months, infants can switch visual attention from objects immediately in front of them to events (such as a light flashing) on the periphery of their visual field (Maurer & Lewis, 1998). By three or four months, they are able to organize complex visual configurations, distinguishing between intersecting forms (Quinn, Brown & Streppa, 1998) and exploiting illusory contours to perceive boundaries and depth ( Johnson & Aslin, 1998). Babies appear to be particularly interested in faces, which hold their attention and elicit smiles (Fantz, 1961). Some evidence indicates that even neonates less than one hour old prefer illustrations of a human face to other patterns of similar complexity, and they prefer regularly organized representations to pictures that jumble the facial features ( Johnson & Morton, 1991). Such early preferences raise the serious (if controversial) possibility that infants have innate ‘face detectors’, which direct their attention to this aspect of the visual environment (Slater et al., 2000).