ABSTRACT
The early stages of vision are primarily serial. Visual stimuli pass sequentially through the eyes’ optics, which are responsible for forming the retinal image; the photoreceptors, which sample and transduce the image into neural signals; and two to four retinal neurons, which transform and transmit those signals to the optic nerve and eventually to the central visual pathways. Considerable information is lost in these early stages of the visual process as evidenced by the close correspondence between the filtering properties of the optics and receptors, and some measures of visual sensitivity (e.g., Banks, Geisler, & Bennett, 1987; Coletta, Williams, & Tiana, 1990; Pelli, 1990). In this chapter, we examine how immaturities among these early stages of vision limit the spatial vision and the color vision of human neonates.
