A study from the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain has concluded that a baby’s visual experience may be quite limited.
The study, conducted with Susan Rivera, an associate professor at UC Davis, and David Whitney, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, tracked the eye movements of a group of 6 to 15-month-olds. The infants were shown four squares that flickered from black to white and back, and one square that instead flickered white to black, out of phase with the others.
Researchers were surprised to discover that infants failed to spend more time looking at the out-of-phase square – indicating they did not perceive its irregularity.
"Their visual experience of changes around them is definitely different from that of an adult…It was surprising how coarse their resolution was," said Faraz Farzin, a graduate student at UC Davis who conducted the work alongside Rivera and Whitney.
Farzin and her colleagues noted that the speed limit on an infant’s vision is around half a second, making it roughly 10 times slower than for adults.
The study’s findings – which will now be extended to people with developmental disorders affecting visual perception, such as dyslexia and autism – was published online by Psychological Science.
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