From Scott P. Johnson’s “Development of Visual-Spatial Attention” (2019) from the UCLA Baby Lab.

Newborn Scanning Behavior

  • Even though newborn visual acuity and contrast sensitivity are limited, infants actively scan their environment. The field of view is relatively small, so that newborns often fail to detect targets too far distant or too far in the periphery.
  • Importantly, early fixations (when newborns look around) are biased toward areas of high contrast, like edges. This behavior is adaptive: edges/high-contrast regions are visually informative and easier for newborns’ immature vision to detect.

Visual Preferences for High vs. Low Contrast

  • The chapter reviews classic infant-preference research (Fantz, etc.) showing that newborns reliably prefer patterned over unpatterned stimuli, and among patterned stimuli, they prefer high-contrast ones over low-contrast or plain ones.
  • Because newborns’ contrast sensitivity is low, the strength of contrast plays a big role in what they can perceive and attend to.

Role in Orienting and Attention

  • Early visual attention (orienting) is largely driven by bottom-up factors in newborns — that is, salient physical features like luminance contrast strongly guide where infants look.
  • As infants mature, they transition to more “purposeful” scanning, relying less solely on bottom-up cues and more on developing cortical control.
  • The high-contrast edges and patterns support the development of this orienting system by offering salient “anchors” for eye movements and attention early on.

Gaze Control & Eye Movement Development

  • Early eye movements are controlled: reflexive saccades (fast eye jumps) are more dominant at birth, whereas smooth pursuit (tracking moving objects) improves over the first months.
  • High-contrast stimuli likely facilitate this development because they produce stronger visual signals that elicit more reliable eye movement responses.

Interaction with Neural Maturation

  • The chapter discusses how the visual system’s neural architecture (retina, LGN, primary visual cortex, etc.) and its connections are immature at birth, but rapidly develop in the early months.
  • Because the early visual system is more sensitive to basic features (like luminance contrast) than to fine detail, high-contrast stimuli may help “train” or tune neural circuits by providing robust input.

Learning and Experience

  • Visual attention development is not purely maturational; experience matters. Infants actively sample their visual world, and their biased attention toward high-contrast features helps them pick up meaningful information.
  • Thus, presenting or ensuring infants encounter patterns with strong contrast can support their natural visual exploration and learning.

This Supports the Use of High-Contrast Patterns in Early Infancy

  • Because newborns preferentially attend to high-contrast edges, these kinds of patterns maximize the chance that infants will see, orient to, and engage with visual stimuli.
  • This engagement is not passive — by focusing on high-contrast regions, infants are likely practicing early attention control, saccades, and scanning behavior, which are foundational for later visual-cognitive development.
  • High-contrast patterns provide a rich, reliable signal for a visual system that is still maturing, helping to “drive” neural activity in early visual circuits in a way that lower-contrast, subtle stimuli may not.