Color Vision Development in Infants

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Color Vision Development in Infants: The Responsibility of Cone Types and Wavelength in Order of Color Development
It is a wonderful thing to witness a sunset and see all the various colors that occur in our world. What would it be like if we didn’t view the sunset with all the beautiful colors that are perceived in it? According to Brown, Lindsey, Mcsweeney, and Walters, (1994) without factoring in brightness, newborn infants cannot differentiate between colors. This was found by testing infants in forced-choice preferential looking experiments or FPL experiments (Brown et al., 1994). It is astonishing to think that we haven’t always viewed the world in various vibrant colors. So at what point do we as individuals develop full color vision?
It was determined that infants develop color vision at or around three months of age and that when final results were evaluated and compared to adult (only) measures, actually have better quality color vision (Brown et al., 1994). An interesting study by Chase (1937) made efforts to discover the identities of color in which infants that aged 2 to 10 weeks old were tested to find out what colors they could perceive. The results they came up with were that very young infants could tell the difference between the primary colors and combinations but there were numerous limitations to the study (Chase, 1937). The study had placed infants to lie down and view a screen while observing eye movements (Chase, 1937). Findings by Franklin, Pilling, and Davies (2005) explain that color categorizing occurs in four month old infants and adults alike. A study by Bornstein, Kessen, & Weiskopf (1976) has supporting evidence that color is categorized in 4 month old infants and determined the boundaries within...

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... it is new in their development of color. Some limitations may be order effects of pairs given to each participant or the age of individuals. Participants three weeks old may be too “old” to identify before color development starts and it seems unethical to test a 1 week old. Another huge factor that could have given more clearly concise results would have been to conduct a longitudinal study to find exactly mark at which they begin to view the color green.
Conclusion
This study will enable individuals to get more precise, specific details on how color is developing in early infants. By making this information available to the public, it could help parents further understand their child and what changes are going on in the developmental stages. It could also help the consumer production by producing stimulating child toys at different stages of color development.

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