We’ve had quite a few friends and family have babies in the last few years. Most, if not all have deployed some form of the Tummy Time routine. I do buy into the idea of this, and it’s always fun to watch a fairly young infant lying on their tummy, trying to raise their head to look at pictures and shapes.
I listened to a recent episode “RadioLab”. Which they are available in podcast form. The episode was really about how AI learns.
But it got me thinking. All of these new parents take pains to inform the old people as to why there are shapes that are always monochromatic. More than that, the shapes are black and white, with no gray tones.
Here’s what I want to know: Is there any hard science that proves that infants cannot perceive shades of gray or color?
And much more to the point of this post: What happens if I introduce many shades of colors to an infant or toddler? Do I blow up their little brains or do they actually learn to differiate much earlier and much more quickly?
A circle is a circle until it is duodecadron with many sides that a small child might clearly be able to perceive.
The color red as perceived by most people stands out very differently than the color blue.
What if I were to go to the Home Depot paint department and bring home a hundred chip panels? Those little vertical cardboard strips that have an accurate rendering of a certain color, along with the name and code number.
Would it terribly confuse an infant or toddler to see a subtle range of colors?
What if I started with twenty?And increased it to a hundred.And then three hundred?
And going all the way back to the Tummy Time exercise, what if I introduced illustrations that were varying in shades of gray instead of stark black and white? Can an infant see those subtleties? Or would it appear to their brain as a complete lack of image?
At the time of my post, there gave been 34 views and no responses. I’m assuming that means everyone else was as baffled as me. I dislike flouting ignorance, but before thos post I had never heard of something called “tummy time”, or the idea that babies need to look at monochrome shapes.
Never heard of tummy time. The article linked by Darren_Garrison suggests that there is science behind the idea of using monochrome shapes:
Research from the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, amongst others, has shown that in the first few months of life, a newborn baby sees primarily in shades of black, grey and white.
although it doesn’t link to that research. I tried to search for it, and found this paper, which seems to say the exact opposite:
The newborn infant’s visual world is almost certainly neither a Jamesian confusion, nor a patternless haze, nor the equivalent of blindness. We have a high level of confidence that it is a highly organized (albeit immature), rapidly developing version of adult vision, rich in pattern, contrast, and color, …
I also found this paper published by Stanford University, which directly addresses the use of monochrome toys:
Recent studies at the University of California in Berkeley have shown that infants as young as 2 weeks of age have color vision and can distinguish a red object from a green one even when these are perfectly matched in brightness. … But what about those black and white mobiles? Well, all this research tells us that a normal visual environment without black and white toys is quite rich and stimulating to your baby. … As far as the black and white toys are concerned, they may be highly visually attractive; but they are not visually necessary!
I’d sure like to see the Smith-Kettlewell research which supposedly says that babies see only in monochrome, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Anecdotal with no evidence…but we were told by our physicians and baby care teams that babies perceive color pretty well. What they lack is full development of the lens and cornea and have difficulty with focus and depth of field. So the use of monochrome, or simple primary colors, help stimulate baby-vision because of their high contrast to define shapes and objects, but not because of any lack of color perception.
(Never ask a baby to provide a torpedo targeting solution)
With verbal humans or intelligent animals, we can behaviorally test their perception of color e.g. by a discrimination task. With babies and other animals, we need more objective measures. We can characterize the photoreceptors, brain regions, or genes that cause expression of the former - this can identify a “bottleneck” in the maximum the organism can perceive, but with (most) babies they have especially the genetic component. But all this means is that their visual system is sufficient to see color, not that it actually can. So other measures can identify actual discrimination. This can include things like showing them a color patch for some time until they get “bored” of it, and show another to see if it directs their attention. If it does, they see a difference.
It’s not harmful to any organism to see a color they can’t perceive, it does not appear as a void but would be perceived similarly to a color that other people see a clear difference. Most color blind adults and mammals like cats and dogs see color, but have a realm of confusion somewhere in the red-orange-yellow-green range, while blues and violet are clearly different. True black and white color vision can exist in both the animal kingdom and some color blind humans, but it’s not the common type in humans, and usually in highly nocturnal or sea-dwelling animals.
Individual colors (hues) aren’t discrete phenomena. They’re the learned names we give our visual system’s interpretation of the electromagnetic spectrum. Some languages don’t discriminate between blues and greens the same as you, and some have more finely graded distinctions between blues. In this case, you’d characterize the wavelength/frequency of the EM.
I don’t think babies are known to not see any color, but it’s rather poor and develops over the first few months. Shades of gray are easier, but still developing. They seem to see more saturated colors better than desaturated for example. Their contrast sensitivity and acuity aren’t fully developed either.
Shades of grey are, well 50 fold, (if you believe certain authors ).
I find them hard to discriminate. And, I’ve been to and graduated from Art school.
So are beiges, tans, even blacks can be different. You can’t expect a ??? aged infant to be able to til they learn.
And then you erase all that at an arbitrary age of 4 or 5 years and say “Here’s the names of colors, learn them, recognize, match and eventually spell and write the “color words”! Good luck in your color journey, child!”
If the kid wants to learn more about color, they will.
I have one grandchild obsessed with the color paint chip aisle at Home Depot. They let her choose a few everytime they go in. I gave her a cardboard sliding color wheel. She loves it. And makes up names for colors. I see a occupation for her, someday.
Hey, somebody gotta do that. Those silly names don’t fall out of the sky, ya know?
Man, I hated giving my son tummy time. Little babies are so boring. But I did subscribe to this, I dunno, baby toy subscription service where they send you a whole bunch of developmentally appropriate stuff, and early in his life they sent a bunch of black and white things. Like a mobile that looks like a spiral.
And people may scoff at an overpriced subscription box, but I needed to be entertained in some way, and my son loved every single one of those toys. I don’t think there was a single dud in twelve months.
Omg.. there’s subscription service for baby’s and tummy time?
Did not know that..the last babies we had, the twins, just got put on the floor on a blanket. Usually head to head to each other til they started grabbing at each other and pulling hair.
Then it was separate blankies. Til they started scooting around. Then all hell broke out.
One baby would go one way, the other would go the opposite.
They were put in jail after that. The play pen. Til they decided it was a boxing ring.
I looked at Pantone color swatches books. Good grief…pricey. Don’t remember where mine came from. It’s old and kinda beat up.
I admit I’m a little skeptical about advice regarding parenting infants, as it seems like it constantly changes. I’m sure tummy time has some scientific basis but somehow humanity survived without it. As a new parent you’re just overloaded with all this stuff you’re supposed to be doing and a lot of it is BS. Don’t get me started on the whole attachment parenting thing. Parenting is hard enough without feeling joined at the hip with your infant.
I mean some people are into that and that’s fine, but don’t pretend it’s scientifically validated as objectively superior than allowing yourself a shower once in a while.
It’s not really about the baby recognizing color, it’s about recognizing shape. The best way to illustrate a shape is with high contrast, and the highest contrast is black and white. There’s a reason print materials are mostly black letters on white paper.
I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t make much difference if you used high contrast colors - say bright yellow on bright red - but it’s not going to add much variety either. Why not show the baby pictures of rainbows for a change of pace?
I suppose we all want the best for our kids, and little, helpless babies demand attention.
35/40 years ago, we probably had some ideas about the best way to help them develop, but they were based on a mix of “old wives’ tales” and my wife’s experience as a nurse in a Special Care Baby Unit.
They had “tummy time”, although we had never heard of it. Wriggling about on the floor, facing up or down, was a “good” thing… I recall doing “cycling” exercises, which meant holding their feet while they pushed against me. As for colours, most toys were in primary colours, and I think that still applies today. What’s the point of limiting them?
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