What can your newborn see?

Newborns see relatively poorly at birth. Newborn vision at birth is about 20 to 30 times worse than that of adults. Newborns also cannot see a lot of colors very well, especially blues and purples.

However, infant vision is specifically suited to the needs of a newborn.

Infants can perceive light as demonstrated by the papillary reflex. Newborns are slightly far sighted. They see objects best that are approximately 18 inches from their eyes. This turns out to be the distance as which most mothers naturally hold their child when nursing or cuddling.

Scientists speculate that this match between a mother's instinct and newborn vision can help a baby to better learn the details of his mother's face.

The eyes of newborns as young as one week are usually drawn to a look more at a moving stimulus than at a comparable stationary object. Infants are also drawn to the contours of objects, and they spend little time inspecting the internal features of objects. Their eyes are drawn specifically to the outline of faces since they cannot yet detect the inner details of faces.

In the months following birth, cones, the parts of the eye that allow color vision, migrate toward the center of the retina, grow larger, and become more densely packed. This allows infants to see more details and to be able to see in dimmer light. In fact, infants develop detail, motion, and color vision very rapidly over the first six months of life.

Around thee months of age infants begin to be able to focus the lens of their eye on their own in order to see objects at varying distances. Three-month-old children also prefer their mother's face to the faces of strangers on the basis of vision alone, which indicates that three-month-olds can see their mother's face at least well enough to identify their mother on the basis of vision alone.

Between three and five months of age infants develop the ability to follow objects in a coordinated manner. Even newborns will visually track a moving object, but around three or four months of age infants begin to track objects with both eyes in harmony. During this time period they develop convergence, the ability of both eyes to look at the same object at the same time. They also develop coordination, the ability of both eyes to follow a moving stimulus in a coordinated fashion, at around six months.

After the first six months of life development slows. However, it is important to realize that babies can have widely different rates of development during the first year of life and still end up with normal vision.