Babies are WEIRD!!

[MrGrizz]

Before my sister had her first baby the family threw the traditional baby shower. Many of the gifts given were actually more appropriate for 1-2 year olds, and this was puzzling enough, but when I came accross a few toys for infants/neo-nates while rumaging through the spoils of the partyI noticed an odd corrlelation. All of the toys had a similar color scheme of red, black and white. When I asked my sister about this she said it was becuase babies can only see a few colors (presumably the aformentioned) when they are born and develop the ability to see the rest of the visual spectrum slowly after a few months (or was it weeks...). Is this true? And if so, do we know why? And if so, why? Does this have anything to do with the fact that all babies are born with blue eyes? Since I recieved a savage beating from the security guard at the local maternity ward (he took my Dutchboy paint swacthes too), for trying to conduct my own expeiments, I gotta get the straight dope.

--J, from Fulsom prison, serving 6 mos. to life, for poking around with neo-nates in maternity after hours.

p.s. I have been a dope reader for just inside a month so forgive me if I haven't progressed far enough into the archive to cathch a previous answer to my querry.

[ShibbOleth]

MrGrizz, welcome to the Boards!

Here's what I pulled from the first site I looked at, from Dr. Joanna Harris, East Central (OK) U. psych dept

Overall Vision
A two week old infant has an eyesight equivalent to 20/800.
By 4 or 7 months old an infant has full color vision.
By 2 years of age, most children have 20/60

Most children will achieve 20/25 vision by age 5.
By age 9, a child sees as clearly as an adult.

Color Vision
At 2 months infant can distinguish the colors red and green
By 3 months they can see the color blue..
At 4 months they can distinguish between the colors red, green, blue and yellow. Their two favorite colors are red and blue.

Pattern Vision
Children over 2 months old prefer complex patterns such as pin stripes, bullseyes, newsprint, checkerboard to more simplistic patterns.
All infants prefer looking at the human face over anything else, regardless of whether that face is real or a character, scrambled or correct.
1 month olds visually scan the outside areas of human face.
2 month old and older infants visually scan the interior triangle of the human face (eyes, nose and mouth).

A second search found this from the University of Calgary, which I found a bit more explanatory:

Sensitivity to Light and Color
Light

Light sensitivity is lower among infants than adults. At 1 month, an infants light detection threshold is about 50 times greater that that of an adult; by 3 months, their threshold decreases so that it is only 10 times higher that an adult's. The increase in sensitivity appears to be due to the increased length of the photoreceptors.

Color Vision

Although the ability to discriminate different colors is not fully developed at birth, infants' sensitivity profile for different wavelengths is similar to that of adults. Their sensitivity is greatest to intermediate wavelengths (yellow/green) and less for short (blue) and long (red) wavelengths. At 1 week, infants are able to discriminate long (e.g. reds, oranges) and medium wavelengths (e.g. yellows, greens) relatively well. This presumably reflects the development of the long (L) and medium (M) wavelength cones. Newborns and even infants as old as 1 month, however, can have difficulty discriminating between short (S) wavelengths (e.g. blues). This may be due to absence of the S cones and associated mechanisms in the cortex. By 2 months, the S cones of infants are functional, allowing the infant to better discriminate between short wavelength colors. By 4 months, infants with normal color vision appear to categorize color more or less the same way as an adult with normal trichromatic vision.

An infant's developing color vision abilities can exemplified using the diagram below. At 1 week, the infant is likely to perceive the desaturated red (top) to be different from the uniform gray (both are of same luminance). A difference between the desaturated blue and uniform gray (bottom) is not likely to be perceived until about 2 months.

There is a nice diagram at the bottom of that second site. It essentially seems to come down to contrast and the ease of perceiving it. There's even a self-test there.

A couple of side notes:

1) When you want some responses to a topic in GQ, it's generally better to give some hint of the question in the thread title. This is a bit specific and sounds more like a MPSIMS thread.

2) Neither of my children had blue eyes at birth. So I don't have personal data to back your assertion that all children are born with blue eyes. YMMV.

[Fretful Porpentine]

I used to work at a toy store where we sold red-black-and-white mobiles and play sets (as well as ones in more "traditional" bright colors or pastels). The red-black-and-white ones were advertised as more stimulating for infant brains, and were immensely popular with older, yuppie-type parents. Less upscale folks tended to go for toys with more colors. I have no idea whether the babies actually preferred one over the other.

So I think the toy preferences at your sister's party might say more about the demographics of the buyers than they do about babies