How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

This book examines the contrast sensitivity of the human visual system - concerning the eye's ability to distinguish objects from each other or from the background - and its effects on the imageforming process. The text provides equations for determining various aspects of contrast sensitivity, in addition to models that easily can be used for practical applications.

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.

The developing infant can accomplish all important perceptual tasks that an adult can, albeit with less skill or precision. Through infant perception research, infant responses to experiences enable researchers to reveal perceptual competence, test hypotheses about processes, and infer neural mechanisms, and researchers are able to address age-old questions about perception and the origins of knowledge. In Development of Perception in Infancy: The Cradle of Knowledge Revisited, Martha E. Arterberry and Philip J. Kellman study the methods and data of scientific research on infant perception, introducing and analyzing topics (such as space, pattern, object, and motion perception) through philosophical, theoretical, and historical contexts. Infant perception research is placed in a philosophical context by addressing the abilities with which humans appear to be born, those that appear to emerge due to experience, and the interaction of the two. The theoretical perspective is informed by the ecological tradition, and from such a perspective the authors focus on the information available for perception, when it is used by the developing infant, the fit between infant capabilities and environmental demands, and the role of perceptual learning. Since the original publication of this book in 1998 (MIT), Arterberry and Kellman address in addition the mechanisms of change, placing the basic capacities of infants at different ages and exploring what it is that infants do with this information. Significantly, the authors feature the perceptual underpinnings of social and cognitive development, and consider two examples of atypical development - congenital cataracts and Autism Spectrum Disorder. Professionals and students alike will find this book a critical resource to understanding perception, cognitive development, social development, infancy, and developmental cognitive neuroscience, as research on the origins of perception has changed forever our conceptions of how human mental life begins.

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.

Presents an overview of the issues associated with the assessment of young children's vision for optometrists and optometry students. A practical rather than scholarly guide, which includes both experimental data and step-by-step instructions on how to use the techniques. Topics include the importance of early visual assessment, ocular health, contrast sensitivity, and eye movements. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Development of Perception: Psychobiological Perspectives, Volume 2, The Visual System, is the second of two-part series covering vision, audition, olfaction, taste, tactile sensitivity, and sensory-motor activity during ontogenesis. The focus is on approaches to perceptual development that incorporate a psychobiological perspective. The present volume brings together several topics of critical importance to the process of understanding the visual system. The book is organized into three parts. Part A addresses the theoretical and interpretive issues involved in designing and drawing conclusions from research on the development of the visual system. Part B on animal studies of visual development covers the neural and behavioral characteristics of the cat and monkey visual system during the early postnatal period. Part C examines visual development in human infants. Together, these three parts offer a comprehensive coverage of major issues in the structure and function of the developing mammalian visual system. Each chapter emphasizes the behavioral consequences of developing visual functions.