Learning to see
Here’s an interesting article. When a baby is born, it has to "learn" to see– to interpret all the shapes and colors and patterns of light and dark as recognizable objects. How does this process happen? It’s hard to test infants directly, since they can’t talk to us to describe what they are seeing and experiencing.
To understand the development of vision, Pawan Sinha, a professor at MIT, is instead studying children who "learn" to see later in life. These children were born blind, but due to poverty and lack of access to medical care, their conditions were not treated until they were older. Once the kids are treated, the researchers can watch to see the process by which their visual skills (such as color recognition, object recognition, and face recognition) develop. Unlike infants, these kids can describe what they see and so participate in extensive and detailed visual tests.
Sinha has started a comprehensive project in India to identify blind children whose condition is treatable, provide them with treatment, and then study their visual development. I think this is an interesting example in which scientific objectives and humanitarian objectives fit together well.
