Learning to See

Have you ever wondered what your newborn could see when they were first born? Is it normal if their eyes cross? Although it's adorable and we all laugh, it's a legitimate questions many people have.

Newborns have all the eye structures necessary to see, but they haven’t learned to use them yet. Infants' vision begins to develop at birth. Babies spend much of their early weeks and months of life learning how to see--developing such skills as focusing, teaming their eye movements, recognizing depth, developing eye-hand coordination, and making spatial judgments. As the child grows, more complex skills, such as visual perception and visual motor integration, develop to meet the child’s growing need to understand and interpret his world.

Birth to Four Months

When they’re born, babies see in black and white and shades of gray. Because newborns can only focus eight to twelve inches, most of their vision is blurred. Babies first start to learn to focus their eyes by looking at faces and then gradually moving out to bright objects of interest brought near them. Newborns should be able to momentarily hold their gaze on an object for a few seconds, but by 8-12 weeks they should start to follow people or moving objects with their eyes. At first, infants have to move their whole head to move their eyes, but by 2-4 months they should start to move their eyes independently with much less head movement.

When infants start to follow moving objects with their eyes they begin to develop tracking and eye teaming skills. Young infants haven't learned to use their eyes together; they haven't developed enough neuromuscular control yet to keep their eyes from crossing. This alarms many parents, but by 4 or 5 months babies usually have learned to coordinate their eye movements as a team and the crossed-eyes should stop. (If you're seeing your infant's eyes cross after this time, this could indicate a problem, and you should seek the advice of your family optometrist.) By four months, babies start to reach for objects, the beginning of eye-hand coordination. Also by four months of age, babies's visual systems have developed the ability to see in full color, and they're exposed to an exciting new world!

Four to Six Months

As babies learn to push themselves up, roll over, sit, and scoot, eye-body coordination develops as they learn to control their own movements in space. Likewise, four- to six-month-old babies become quite skillful with their eye-hand coordination, able to direct a bottle into the mouth or grasp at objects freely. Their hands become their most important tool--they reach for almost everything they see! This is also the time they start to work on remembering things they see.

By the fourth or fifth month, babies' brains have finished learning how to fuse the pictures coming in from both their right and left eyes into a single image for full binocularity, or "two-eyed" vision with strong depth perception. Spatial and dimensional awareness continue to improve as baby learns to aim accurately when reaching for objects of interest. Likewise, they refine their eye teaming and focusing skills as they learn to look quickly and accurately between near and far distances.

Normal visual acuities, or a child's sharpness of vision, has usually developed to 20/20 by the time the child reaches six months.

Six to Eight Months

Most babies start crawling during this time, further developing eye-body coordination. They learn to judge distances and set visual goals, seeing something and moving to get it. Their sudden freedom allows for many new experiences and the rapid development of visual perception skills as babies experience their own bodies in relation to other objects and notice differences in size, shape, and position. By the sixth month, babies acquire fairly accurate eye movement control. Some experts warn that early walkers may not learn to use their eyes together as well as babies who have crawled a lot and teamed their eyes more when looking at close-up objects.


Eight to Twelve Months

Babies can now judge distances well. Eye/hand/body coordination allows them to grasp and throw objects fairly accurately. Perception skills such as visual memory and visual discrimination help babies make sense of their exciting new world. The integration of their vision and fine motor coordination allows babies to manipulate smaller objects, and many begin feeding themselves with finger foods. Once children start walking, they learn to use their eyes to direct and coordinate their bodies' large muscle groups to guide their whole body movements.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to call our officeat 909-885-1134 or Click Here to email your questions. Or you can ask your questions right here on this blog. We'll be happy to respond.

Thank you to the Children's Vision Information Network for this fascinating article!