ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors examine the empirical studies on how babies perceive visual scenes and how the skills inform understanding of film and TV perception. They outline the perceptual and cognitive skills the babies need to have or develop in order to make sense of their visual environments and moving images. The authors discuss how infants perceive the similarity between a two-dimensional image and the real three-dimensional entity. Children older than three months old show a clear face preference in either dynamic displays or static stimulus arrays, which might explain why trains, cars and flowers, have faces in animated films. Match-on-action refers to an editing technique where a subject begins an action in one shot and carries it through to completion in the next. The matched-exit/entrances emerged in the earliest edited films as a direct loan from the method of leaving a scene via the wings of a theatre.
