OCR Text |
Show VISION (Those articles are submitted weekly by your Optometrists ot Southern Utah, in cooperation with your local newspaper, in order to better acquaint you with the function and problems of vision). Question: How do we see? What is the difference be-' be-' twecn sight and vision? Answer: We sec with our brain, through the eyes, but in a space world that we build around us. Research conclusively con-clusively shows that seeing is learned and is not done by the eyes alone. The eye is not anatomically developed until un-til the 14th week after birth. Little by little the child learns by practice to coordinate the eyes and the brain, until his visual apparatus can discriminate size, shape, distance, color and action. The child begins to build his world close to him. He uses his mouth, his hands, and his eyes for this purpose and in that order. As his experience grows, he learns to organize or-ganize his world in space away from him, so that gradually gradual-ly he may use his eyes alone to gain experience. It has been further shown that as he continues to learn, the movements involved in vision assume a characteristic pattern, made possible by the progressive development of the nervous system. This we call a behavior pattern. Since each child builds his own perceptual world, his visual behavior be-havior pattern will vary from that of every other child. These patterns are as individual to him as are his learned patterns of walking and talking. As the speaking voice differs dif-fers from one child to another, depending on how he has learned to use his tongue, vocal cords and breathing apparatus, ap-paratus, just so his seeing pattern differs. To build an effective visual pattern, however, is much more difficult because he can check his speaking pattern against, that in general use around him, but there is no check for his visual pattern except that of his own achieve-! ment. Another difference lies in the fact that we can see 'him learn to walk and hear him learn to talk, but only a trained obeserver can watch him learn to see. Now we can understand the difference between sight and vision. Sight is what the child has at birth for exam-l exam-l pie, that thing which causes him to look toward a bright spot. But vision is that ability by which he interprets the bright spot into meaning, and it develops only after the practice necessary to learning. This meaning will vary w ith the visual pattern he has learned. |