This is the major question for children so young when confronted with all the tools and artifacts of our heavily visual culture: how do young children, even infants perceive visual media??? There’s a lot of interesting research on image perception and young childrenthat Lisa Guernsey looks at that break down the factors at play.
So, at a very basic level of the perceptual organs involved, do little children “see” the same way adults do? Lisa Guernsey notes the sensory organs of infants are just developing and so it is hard to truly know what a 10 month old “sees” and in fact at that age, they can’t focus the same way adults can on images. So what they “see” as infants are probably more imagistic and blurry, not sharply focused.
Lisa also points out Judy DeLoache’s research on “insensitivity to picture orientation” which is pretty typical until age 2 1/2. So a 2 year old can look at upside-down pictures and perceive them just as well as right side up pictures.
The research on how and what infants see is perhaps particularly hampered by how much research can be done with infants as subjects. Anyway, vis the research about what IS known about how children perceive visual images, Guernsey asks: what does it mean to expose such young children to visual media on a screen (video, TV) —is it doing any good or doing any harm? How can we shape their exposure, which is almost unavoidable given the social and commercial phenomena of visual media directed towards and consumed by infants and young children?
This is for me the “message” or one of the messages of Lisa’s book- that all this visual media (and now, “interactive” media) is here to stay, and so what we should be doing is making the best kind of choices around how we and our kids engage with it.
