The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that children do not perceive the world around them in the same way as adults.
According to scientists from University College London and Birkbeck University of London, adults fuse their sensory experiences together. We lose the ability to focus on isolated pieces of sensory information. For example, an adult perceives a barking dog as a single entity; a five-year-old sees the big dog and the loud barks as two separate sensory incidents.
This does not only apply to combining different senses, such as vision and sound. The brain also receives different information when looking at a scene with one eye compared to both eyes. One test asked children and adults to assess object depth by looking at it first with one eye, then both.
We begin to combine sensory information to make better sense of the world around the age of 12.