I'm reading On Intelligence, by Hawkins. He argues that our brains are always making predictions about what our senses are going to tell us, and that this in part explains why we don't notice our blind spots. We don't notice them because our brain "fills in" whatever it predicts to see. So that got me wondering: what about babies? Without a lifetime of experience to tell them what to fill in to those blind spots, do they have a big gapin hole in their visual field? How would you even test this? How long after birth does the blind spot persist?
Any thoughts?
I think the babies will be alright with the blind spot, the brain just fills in the blind spot with the immediate surround, so no experience would be necessary. I think that infant vision would be spectacular, their brains don't know what to expect or "look for", everythng seems new and interesting to them. Once vision loses it's novelty it loses it's excitement, now it takes Avatar movies or psychedelic drugs to experience unexpected visual sensations.
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