From blur to focus: a look at your baby's early vision
When your baby is born, their vision is not yet fully developed; they don't see things in the same way that adults do, and what they see is blurred. Your baby focuses at around 20 to 30cm and will have a preference for looking at faces and high contrast images.
Clarity of vision means there's more to process
When your baby is born, they do not simply have a blurred version of the adult vision. Their vision is different as they need the experience to process the things that they see, as well as time to develop control of their eyes and clarity of vision.
It could be that having blurry vision at birth helps your baby not to become overwhelmed with information, as with greater clarity would come more things to understand and process.[1]
Faces, patterns and moving objects
Your baby will have a preference for looking at faces and might also prefer high contrast patterns,[2] rather than complex pictures. They are likely to look for longer a geometric pattern than at a picture of an animal. Your baby will not be able to track objects smoothly yet, so if they try to follow a moving object with their eyes you might notice that their eyes jump between places and stay a little behind the object.
When an object is still your baby might stare at it and seem to find it difficult to move their eyes away; this ‘sticky fixation’[1] might cause agitation as they find it difficult to move their focus from a particular point.
Developing focus, touch and gradual understanding
Your baby’s vision will develop through experience. As they gain experience of the visual world, they will develop connections in their brain that enable them to focus and process what they see.
Much of your baby’s early exploration of the world will be through touch, and particularly touch using their mouth, but as their fine motor skills develop they will bring together information from what they see and feel to understand objects.
In the coming months, your baby will develop the clarity of what they see as well as developing their ability to follow objects with their eyes. Vision will become important in the development of other skills as your baby is able to look and judge distance and combine their visual and motor skills to reach for objects. They will be able to follow objects with their eyes and see differences between shapes and symbols – these skills will help them much later on when they start to read and write.
References:
[1] Addyman, C (2020) The laughing baby: The extraordinary science behind what makes babies happy. London: Unbound.
[2] Ludington-Hoe, SM (1983) What can newborns really see? The American Journal of Nursing. 83(9) pp. 1286-1289.
[3] Johnson, MH. (2002) The development of visual attention: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. In Johnson, MH, Munkata, Y and Gilmore RO, Brain Development and Cognition A Reader. 2nd Edition Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, pp. 134-150.