How a very young baby sees the world

A new baby's brain is exact
It can see things you can't; that's a fact,
But its brain has to choose
What to keep, what to loose
And the key shapes it needs to extract.

Trying to find out what a very young baby actually sees would seem to be an almost impossible job, but a recent Scientific American article summarizing research by a team led by Jiale Yang of Chuo University, Japan, has produced some interesting results.

We see what we expect to see - we hear what we expect to hear

The BPS Research Digest reports on research in which dollar notes were attached to a tree to see what people did - and a significant number of people never noticed them,

It makes me wonder - is there some similarity with the problem of confirmation bias - for instance when we read a text, or listen to someone speaking, the things we tend to notice are the passages which support our views. Whatever sense is operating the inputs are automatically optimised to extract features that are relevant to us at the time.