Developing an Eye for Color
With my nephew's room being painted a bold blue, I couldn't help but think about the development of colour vision in babies. I remember hearing that babies can't see all colours immediately, and even can't focus their eyes for the first few weeks. In fact, babies only seem to notice things that move at first because focusing takes such time and development, so mobiles and ceiling fans will keep their attention should they be awake. It takes the eyes of a baby one to two months to be able to study the parents' faces, and two more to recognise it. It's at about month four that colour starts to fade in as in adult eyes.
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Watching the Colours Change
 | The rods in the eye, the black-and-white receptors, develop first, and soon after come the cones, the receptors for colours. One of the first colours a baby can comes at about four months. The first among those colours they can see is red, and as the red cones develop the green cones are inhibited while green cones will inhibit red, and blue will inhibit both in return. Almost concurrently with red comes blue. It's like a tiny battle for the postage stamp-sized tissue in the back of your eyes. As a result, there are some baby toys out there, like this one by Manhattan Toy Co., designed specifically around this to stimulate the baby's development. |
Technology has also grown with the understanding of the human eye in that televisions and monitors use red, green, and blue, just like the human eye, rather than the primary colours we all learned in elementary school.
What You Can Do
| Some researchers have suggested that a babies room colours change with their eyes. While this is hard because we can't see as they do, there is a general sense that bold and bright colours will be best for the baby which means pastels, which are automatically associated with babies, don't hurt at all, but don't necessarily aid in speeding development. |  |
It has been suggested that a baby's room be painted in black, white, and red in correspondence with the first developmental stage, but more importantly comes stimulating the baby with changing the exposure angles of light in moving the crib and the baby's position in the crib often. Ultimately, the baby will learn to focus on faces, on objects, and learn about the world it lives in just by being exposed to it, and every day is a brand new exposure.
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RT @gerrenlamson: Here's a neat tool that converts RGB & HEX colors into physical paint options: http://t.co/z7JsZjQ2Im (h/t @colourlovers)
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about 18 hours ago
winterblue
retsof
http://www.photius.com/flags/horizontal_red_white_black_stripes.html
mirz
vredeling
Nonetheless, interesting to think about the way we learn to distinguish colours. We can see their are certain sexual differences, of course. We probably don't all adopt exactly the same feeling for contrasts. So perhaps thinking of colour perception as distributed unevenly among people instead of more absolute could benefit design. Or complicate it further. :)
ruecian
vredeling: I really feel for the children that are pushed into fields like music -- four-year-old violin players, for example -- and sports because it's usually the parents that want it so badly for them, and the children just want to be children. I think that's when I have a problem with what parents do with their children. The vision development is interesting, and it will come on its own, otherwise we'd all be stumbling around in the world, inappropriately feeling with our hands.
jkd821
vredeling
ruecian
There's certainly no harm in it. It's not forcing anything, since its the baby's eyes that grow, and will grow with or without colour. It just helps it come sooner because they can focus and be stimulated by the colours.
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