Why is it important for early childhood professionals to know the basics of visual development?
What babies perceive, recognise and use to communicate and learn is still under study. Understanding how sensory, motor and perceptual systems develop in typically developing children gives us a global view of human development. Each gesture in the newborn is the basis for the organisation of a complex system. If we know how to read the individual, he expresses himself, as Gessell said: “The child shows himself to anyone who listens to what he says and observes what he does with a keen eye”.
The first year of life is the most important in development and is often the least understood in the clinical setting. Responsibility for people’s vision is not just the responsibility of care professionals in the health sector, as it is linked to other spheres of life, such as education, employment and leisure. It therefore influences all of them.
Vision is at the service of motor and perceptual development, at the service of social communication and learning. As it is the sensory system that we mainly use to move, communicate and learn, it is worthwhile for all those involved in early childhood support to be aware of its functions and possible alterations.
What are the basic visual functions in the first year of life?
Lea Hyvärinen, a Finnish ophthalmologist, divides the development of the visual system into different stages related to communication, motor functions, perception and recognition of shapes or awareness and orientation in space.
By listing the 5 stages described by the vision expert, we can already identify fundamental aspects of function in the service of optimal development.
- 1: perception of faces and biological movement. Responses have been measured in babies between 1 and 5 days old.
- 2: eye contact and social interaction. Different responses to smiling faces and expressionless faces show the importance of visual communication with attachment and reference figures. Mirror neurons play an important role in this interaction.
- 3: hand awareness, motor functions and anticipation. From 4 months babies show changes in fixation between objects. In addition, hand movement seems to be influenced by visual function. When vision is complete and binocular, arm movement is more precise than if it is only with the vision of one eye.
- 4: communication and face recognition. The baby recognises family members by visual discrimination without the need for the parent to speak in order to be recognised. The function of pointing also enters this stage where sharing the object is part of the exploration of the environment.
- 5: abstract shape play to assess visual function. Playing with geometric shapes at an early age allows observation of the eye-hand relationship, visual memory and recognition of different shapes and orientation in space.
The observation of visual function opens a world for early detection and monitoring, we are in the era of prevention and health and education agents can be great advisers if we have the appropriate skills.
If you want to know more about visual function, do not miss the TMPI talks between Lucila To and Iñaki Pastor that you can find on our YouTube channel.
And if you are interested in the subject and want to train, do not miss the next course: Vision in child development and learning. All the information in the following link.
References:
- WHO – 2019 – World report on vision copia. (n.d.).
- Hunnius, S. (2007). The early development of visual attention and its implications for social and cognitive development. Progress in Brain Research, 164(07), 187–209. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-6123(07)64010-2
- Hyvärinen, L., Walthes, R., Jacob, N., Chaplin, K. N., & Leonhardt, M. (2014). Current Understanding of What Infants See. Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, 2(4), 142–149
- Vanderwert RE, Nelson CA. The use of near-infrared spec- troscopy in the study of typical and atypical development. Neu- roimage. 2014;85(01):264–71. A well written overview that also clinicians can read.
- Corbetta, D., Thurman, S. L., Wiener, R. F., Guan, Y., & Williams, J. L. (2014). Mapping the feel of the arm with the sight of the object: on the embodied origins of infant reaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 5. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00576
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