Newborn primates see poorly. Their visual capacities improve over time, with a course that varies somewhat depending on the measure used to define visual function and the species studied. Many common measures of vision have reached adult levels by the age of about 1 year in macaque monkeys, and about 5 years in humans; during the period of maturation, performance typically show a roughly 10- to 30-fold improvement. Figure 1 caricatures the effect on vision of two of these measures, spatial resolution and sensitivity to spatial contrast. The panel on the left shows a cityscape as seen by an adult; the panel on the right shows the same scene transformed to represent the view of a newborn infant – the “infant view” has been spatially lowpass filtered (blurred) and reduced in contrast.