Green Owl Toys Blog

In order for your baby to accumulate knowledge, wisdom, intelligence or even develop she needs experience, and until she gets moving this will intitially involve looking at the world.  But how does your baby even begin to make sense of what she sees?

 When you look around the world, you are not just seeing, you are interpreting what you see as well.  Light waves reach the retina at the back of your eye and this information is transmitted to the visual cortex in your brain where you make sense of it; you ‘perceive’ it.  It is your brain which decides that the small object you are looking at is a car, and simultaneously decides whether it is a big car seen from far away or a toy car seen close up (both of which create the same image on your retina).  But how does your baby’s brain even begin to work all this out?

Newborn babies cannot see as well as adults; they lack the ability to see detail, they cannot easiily track moving objects with their eyes but do this fairly jerkily, and they are not good at scanning objects (casting their eyes over the inside of an object).  They are, however, drawn to notice two things:

• Movement
• Strong contrast.

Focusing on contrast means that your baby will pay attention to the boundaries or edges of objects, which is where contrast is strongest.  It is also useful to focus on the outside of objects if you cannot scan them effectively.  Movemnet hleps your baby recognisze where things begin and end, because as one object moves it obscures other objects, and so the boundaries between different things become more defined.  So your bayb’s early experiences will be about working out where one thing begins and another ends – a reasonable start in a world where nothing is known.

By 5 months your baby should be able to recognise you and reach out for objects.  This means that the eye and brain have learnt many things but it is still good to have bright and many colours around your baby for them to identify objects and where one starts and another ends.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Development milestones, Educational Toys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.