Akadémia Kiadó

Surprisingly, the most effortless act of humans, seeing the world, seems to come very slowly to us. Contrary to common belief, although important visual functions emerge during the first year of life, the completion of visual development extends until the end of childhood. During this long period of plasticity, the visual system is particularly prone to suffer irreversible changes due to abnormal perceptual experience. The collection of studies in this volume have the common theme of mapping normal and abnormal visual development in terms of cortical connectivity patterns. The maturity of cortical connections is estimated by measuring the capacity to spatially integrate local features across the visual field in normally developing children, amblyopics, schizophrenics, and people with Williams Syndrome. Aimed at researchers within the fields of developmental neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, neurology and ophthalmology, this book will be an important first step in assessing intermediate level visual processes from a developmental perspective.