Vision: Developmental Disorders

The development of human visual behavior involves many interleaved processes. These processes have been called sensation, perception, cognition, attention, and action, depending on the interests of the investigator. However, it is often impossible to draw boundaries between them, and their development is highly interlinked. Many researchers take the standpoint that any visual act involves all these processes, in cascading sequences and re-entrant loops of neural activity through multiple brain areas and networks. Neither in normal development nor in disorders of development can they be usefully considered in isolation. In specific disorders, sometimes it may be possible to localize the original source of the pathology, but even then the developmental consequences of this pathology may spread through many levels of processing. It is also important to ...