Vision Develops During a Critical Period

Dr. Suzanne LaCombe, May 13, 2007.
Updated: March 7, 2010.

Vision is sensitive to the timing of when we learn to see. This might surprise a few people as we don't normally think along the lines of "learning to see".

But when an infant is born their perception of the environment is only rudimentary. They must learn to recognize shapes, angles, and colors. They can "see" in some ways, however. For example, their inborn reflexes allow them to immediately follow or track a moving object.

However, they are not yet able to distinguish a human face from an inanimate object. How would they know? They have as yet had no experience to tell the difference. They don't yet know that the Teddy Bear you're holding in your arms is different from the doggy that's running around.

The fact that the ability to see was a learned skill was discovered by the surgeon M. von Senden in the 1920's. When cataracts were removed from the eyes of adults who'd been legally blind from birth, it restored the functional integrity of the optical system, but still failed to restore their sight.

They could "see" something but they couldn't perceive objects as we do. The world was a confusing mix of shapes and colors that made no sense. For these patients, learning to see was a painful process because, unlike normal infants, they had to struggle with their learned conceptions and assumptions of what the world was like in the absence of sight.

Critical Periods Continue into Adolescence

As John Abbott explains in this video, opportunities for growth continue through the teen years.

In many ways this period offers parents a second chance at meeting their child's needs. Children can recover from earlier missattunements and have corrective emotional healing experiences that fill the developmental gaps in their history.

In other words, there is much we can be hopeful about.

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