Research on infant perception has revealed that neonates come equipped with considerable perceptual abilities that develop rapidly in the first year. Newborn visual acuity is poor (approximately 20/400) but improves dramatically over the first 6 months. Color vision, binocular depth perception, and face perception all show rapid development. Methods such as preferential looking, habituation, and visual evoked potentials have allowed researchers to probe perceptual abilities in preverbal infants.
Visual Development
Newborns prefer face-like stimuli, high-contrast patterns, and curved over straight lines. Contrast sensitivity and acuity reach near-adult levels by 6-12 months. Binocular depth perception emerges around 4 months (coinciding with the onset of stereopsis). Infants show perceptual narrowing: they initially discriminate faces and speech sounds from all cultures but become specialized for their own culture's faces and language sounds by 9-12 months.
Since infants cannot report their experiences, researchers use indirect methods. Preferential looking exploits infants' tendency to look longer at novel or preferred stimuli. Habituation-dishabituation measures whether infants notice a change after being familiarized with a stimulus. Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) measure cortical responses to visual stimuli. Eye tracking provides detailed measures of where infants look and for how long. These methods have transformed our understanding of early perceptual competence.