Since the 1960s, there has been great expansion of our understanding of the development of vision in early life. New techniques and technologies have provided unprecedented insights into the function of all the components of the visual system--optical, motor and neural--during this formative period. These insights have come from neurophysiological studies of animal models, electrophysiological and psychophysical studies of infants and young children, and clinical and other studies of such abnormal developmental conditions as amblyopia ("lazy eye"), nystagmus and prematurity. Despite this broadened scope of study of early visual development, there has never been a comprehensive single text or reference work definitively reviewing the entire field. This important work provides such an overview. Prepared under the auspices of the Committee on Vision of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, its in-depth chapters are written by world authorities. Equally useful to the student or clinician looking for a convenient introduction to the field and to the researcher in seeking explicit detail, this book provides a new degree of integration of this diverse field.

When children and adults apply for disability benefits and claim that a visual impairment has limited their ability to function, the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) is required to determine their eligibility. To ensure that these determinations are made fairly and consistently, SSA has developed criteria for eligibility and a process for assessing each claimant against the criteria. Visual Impairments: Determining Eligibility for Social Security Benefits examines SSA's methods of determining disability for people with visual impairments, recommends changes that could be made now to improve the process and the outcomes, and identifies research needed to develop improved methods for the future. The report assesses tests of visual function, including visual acuity and visual fields whether visual impairments could be measured directly through visual task performance or other means of assessing disability. These other means include job analysis databases, which include information on the importance of vision to job tasks or skills, and measures of health-related quality of life, which take a person-centered approach to assessing visual function testing of infants and children, which differs in important ways from standard adult tests.

This second comprehensive edition of Visual Development, Diagnosis, and Treatment of the Pediatric Patient combines basic concepts of vision development with clinical diagnosis and treatment of vision disorders in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescents. Heavily updated, with new sections on timely issues and topics, the book is ideal for anyone who needs to know the practical aspects of evaluation and care of pediatric patients.

As the first introductory-level text in its field, Visual Development offers a comprehensive understanding of the development of the visual system and the effects of visual deprivation. The material is treated from the behavioral, anatomical, and physiological points of view. Complete with ample illustrations and a helpful glossary, this text is invaluable for graduate students, optometry students, and ophthalmology residents as well as for experts in related fields.

This conference was instigated by a combination of factors: The nature of the problem, the wide spread occupational epidemiology reported on eye symptoms and eye fatigue in the workplace, and the organizers' awareness of the complexity of the scientific and clinical bases of knowledge that might be usefully applied. The introduction of new methods into system neurobiology provides new insights into how we receive and process information from the external world, and act upon it. New, non-invasive methods have opened the way to direct observation of the human brain in action. Due particularly to the interaction between the visual and oculomotor requirements involved, several clinical and scientific fields intersect when these issues are considered. To provide clear vision the accommodative and pupillary mechanisms are used. To maintain binocularity, the ver gence oculomotor system, sensitive to fatigue, must attain congruence with accommodative levels. This accommodation-vergence linkage was a focus of our symposium.

This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of what is now known about psychological development, from birth to biological maturity, and it highlights how cultural, social, cognitive, neural, and molecular processes work together to yield human behavior and changes in human behavior.