ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with some of the important tasks of early infancy and later childhood, and the social contexts in which these tasks are addressed. All children arrive in the world sensitive to different kinds of perceptual experience and with an orientation to act on and make sense of their surroundings. There is wide variation in the characteristics that individual children, including those with visual impairments, bring to learning encounters. For this reason we have guarded against using the framework of developmental psychology to understand the relative progress of children with visual impairment, since this has tended to deal with ‘normal’ developmental milestones and has largely ignored environmental context.
