Babies acquire binocular vision by looking around, study says

A baby views patterns that appear to change once binocular vision has developed.… (Gabor Jando, University…)Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary

Early life experiences play a crucial role in the development of normal brain function. In the visual system in particular, a "critical period" takes place during infancy in which the part of the brain that processes what we see becomes highly plastic. If problems are not fixed during the critical period, they often remain for life.

During the experiment, 30 newborn babies viewed a screen with a pattern of dots that changed in a way that only people with binocular vision could detect. When the data were in, the results were clear: Postnatal age determined when binocular vision arrived, with both groups of babies developing it about four months after birth.

Takao Hensch, an expert in the biology of early brain development at Harvard Medical School who was not involved in the study, said the research provides a rare glimpse into how early experiences can change our brains for life. "It's a very clever, very clean experiment where you can look at the effects of experience starting from nothing."

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/22/science/la-sci-binocular-vision-20120623