How the Baby Learns to See: Critical Periods Re-visited
Newborns have very limited vision. Yet they are already learning to see. We discovered this when we took advantage of a natural experiment: children born with dense cataracts in one or both eyes that blocked all patterned visual input until the cataracts were removed during infancy and the eyes given compensatory contact lenses. Even when the babies missed only a few months of visual input, they later developed a host of deficits in both low-level (e.g., acuity, peripheral vision), and high-level (e.g., perceiving the direction of motion, face processing) vision.