Around four months, he is still refining his vision, and will continue to refine his vision until well after his fifth birthday.
Along with visual acuity, visual motor skills (or coordination of the tiny muscles around the eyes) are developing throughout the first year and both components need to be exercised simultaneously. Visual motor skills are important for scanning, reading, and catching a ball.
There are two different kinds of visual scanning. Visual pursuits are smooth scanning to follow a moving target, such as watching a ball to catch it.
Try this exercise to work on visual pursuits:
Saccadic eye movements are tiny movements when the baby’s eyes scan, then stop and focus, then scan again, and stop and focus as in scanning a group of people for mommy’s face. Reading actually requires tiny saccadic eye movements as we scan the line of print and read each letter.
Try this exercises to work on visual saccades:
The tiny muscles on both sides of your baby’s eyes need to develop symmetrically. The following tips will help:
Babies love mirrors! Studies show babies prefer to look at mommy and daddy’s faces, other children’s faces, and their own face in a mirror more than anything else. Babies depth perception will start to develop between four and six months. Allow lots of opportunity to look at different depths in the landscape by getting outside or looking out the window.