Understanding a baby’s view of the world
McMaster University professor honoured for her pioneering work in infant vision
McMaster University psychologist Daphne Maurer has been named a fellow of the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science for her pioneering research into understanding the development of visual perception in children.
For more than four decades, she has worked with graduate researchers in her lab, as well as with partners at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, to better understand how vision develops in newborns with normal sight, and in a rare group of infants born with cataracts.
Maurer, who is a professor emeritus and distinguished university professor in McMaster’s Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, will be presented with a certificate and a rosette pin on Feb. 16 at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington. The AAAS is the largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, among other publications.
The Spectator talked to Maurer about her research. Here is a condensed version of her comments:
Q. What motivated you to first start looking into this area of research?
A. As an undergraduate — in a lab of a researcher who was studying children’s learning — I really fell in love with doing research on development, testing children, documenting how things change and then probing the mechanisms behind the change.
Q. What have you learned about visual development in children from your research?
A. There certainly is vision at birth but the vision is very rudimentary. Things have to be very large and very contrasting right straight ahead for the baby to detect them and respond to them.
There is enormous change after birth. The developmental trajectory is different for different aspects of vision ... visual acuity matures over the next seven years, processing of faces may not reach its maximum till (much later) but certainly it is developing into adolescence. Colour vision is pretty much adult by four months. So there are a whole bunch of developmental stories when one looks at the development of visual perception.
The question is what is controlling the timing. What is the role of experience? What is the role of genetic factors? That is what I have tried to probe, to understand the changes that take place with age.
Q. Why is this important to know?
A. I think it is important to understand the baby’s world ... and developmental mechanisms. It does have applications for parental advice ... the baby is not really differentiating between stimulation coming from the eyes, the ears and the skin. It is just stuff coming from the world, which is why it is so easy to overstimulate a baby in the first month of life ... when the baby is overstimulated, the baby either cries or goes to sleep to find a way to get rid of some of that stimulation.
Q. Where do you think future research in this area should be focused?
A. One of the fascinating questions to better understand is why does experience in the first month of life matter so much when vision is not good and the baby is sleeping a lot. And we think it is because other sensory systems can start taking over some of the cortical tissue that is usually used for vision. And you can’t get it back later. One area for future research would be how the sensory systems are interacting in infancy and it seems to be in a kind of competitive way to grab connections.