Development of visual perception and its implication for education and design

Developmental colour science has investigated how colour perception develops, but little is known about the impact of being colour vision deficient during development and the role of colour in developmental aesthetics. This thesis aims to contribute to theories of perceptual development and to apply research on the development of colour and visual perception to the fields of education and design. This thesis addresses two topics: colour vision deficiency (CVD) in children, and the role of colour and other visual properties in complex images on infants’ and toddlers’ visual preferences.

Paper 1 develops and validates ColourSpot, a new gamified psychophysical test of CVD that is suited for remote and self-administered diagnosis from 4 years old. The paper shows that ColourSpot diagnoses CVD better than other paediatric CVD tests and is a potential tool for improving diagnosis of CVD in children. Paper 2 uses ColourSpot to investigate the impact of CVD on education and wellbeing in 11–16 year olds, identifying educational tasks that children with CVD find challenging.

Paper 3 investigates the role of colour and other visual features in complex abstract images on infants’ and toddlers’ visual preferences. Infants show preferences for faces or odd-one-out features and the dominant colour in an image contributes to visual preference, but not other chromatic and spatial image statistics. Paper 4 further investigates the role of natural chromatic statistics in visual preference and finds that infants do not look longer at abstract images with natural chromatic distributions, contrary to the efficient encoding hypothesis.

The findings produce a gamified optometric test of CVD that can improve diagnosis of CVD in children and provides a better understanding of how to support children with CVD. The thesis also uses an image statistics approach to further understand how the visual system develops and tunes into the characteristics of the visual world and will have implications on guiding designers in producing designs optimised for infants and children.