According to Dr Sears at birth the nerve cells in an infant's brain are unsystematic and ill connected. As the child grows and is exposed to different visual stimulation these inputs of information cause the connections between nerve cells to multiply and strengthen likewise if certain nerve cells are not stimulated these connections will remain weak and could eventually disappear. (cite).
As a child begins to interact with their environment in different ways their visual nerve cells begin to learn and connect. This can be observed through the study of the development of a child's depth perception. Depth perception is the ability to judge distances between different objects and is important for every day motor activities such as walking. (cite) When a child first learns to crawl many new mothers have reported that their child seems fearless of the dangers of things such as large flight of stairs, this is because their depth perception is not yet fully developed and they cannot distinguish the distance between each stair or the distance from the top of the stairs to the bottom. However, as a child is exposed to different depth situations such as watching their mother drop a rubber ducking into the water from the edge of the bath, or rolling a ball down stairs their depth perception will begin to develop and strength. The visual cliff is an experiment designed by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk (1960) to study the presence of depth perception in children, Campos et al (2000) suggest that children with more crawling experience regardless of when they start crawling refuse to cross the visual cliff earlier suggesting that their depth perception develops quicker than children who are not afforded the opportunity for ample crawling. This highlights the importance of children being able to explore their surroundings independently. .
The more movement experience an infant has, the better their development of perceptual awareness becomes.