Two-month-old babies’ visual systems appear ready to distinguish between a variety of common objects, according to new functional MRI study. Studies show that viewing images of different items triggers patterns of brain activity in the ventral visual cortex that correlate with those seen in adults, and that this association strengthens by the time babies are nine months old.

The findings were published earlier this month. natural neurosciencewhich suggests that adult visual representations are more similar to infant visual representations than previously thought. Heather Kosakowskian assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, was not involved in the study. “There were hints pointing to this.” [adult similarity] That may be true for 5 and 7 year olds, but it’s really interesting to know that it’s also true for toddlers. ”

The study involved brain scans of 101 2-month-old infants and 17 adults. The scan images were collected as participants viewed three different images from 12 different visual categories representing everyday objects that babies would have encountered previously, such as cats, birds, food, and shopping carts. The researchers had 44 infants repeat the task at nine months of age.

“Being in and around the lab, Collect infant neuroimaging dataI know how difficult and painstaking that process is,” Apurva Ratan Murthyassistant professor of cognitive and brain sciences at Georgia Tech, was not involved in the study. “To be able to do it at the scale reported in the paper is pretty incredible.”

Studies have shown that images of a certain category elicited more similar patterns of neural activity in the ventral visual cortex than images of different categories. The adult pattern correlates with the pattern seen in 9-month-old infants and only modestly with the pattern seen in 2-month-old infants.

The study also showed that the infants’ activity patterns were similar to those of two deep neural networks trained to classify objects in internet images.

“Many of the complex category structures used in neural network models to classify objects were already present in infants as young as two months old,” the study researchers said. Cliona O’Dohertyis a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and completed his doctoral research. student of Rhodri CusackLaboratory at Trinity College, Dublin. For example, young children seem to recognize that three different cat images belong to the same category. Similarly, their brains distinguish between living and inanimate objects. This complex structure was further refined when the infants were rescanned at 9 months of age.

“Previous studies using fMRI in infants have only looked at specific categories of objects, such as faces and bodies,” Marty says. “This study therefore allows us to analyze visual responses in more detail.”

T

Two-month-old babies showed no evidence of visual categorization within the lateral occipitotemporal cortex, an area of ​​the brain that supports shape perception, a study showed. Activity patterns within this region are “mainly where we’ve seen the biggest differences from adults,” O’Doherty said.

Cusack, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, said the development of the lateral occipitotemporal cortex requires sophisticated motor skills, which improve as babies learn to reach and grasp objects around them. “Perhaps the lateral areas are just slower to develop because they require motor connectivity,” he says.

Another possibility is that you are not receiving a signal on that LO. [lateral occipitotemporal cortex] “Because we don’t have a reliable signal across the infant,” O’Doherty says, “What we haven’t really dug into is whether that structure exists within the individual infant.”

The findings should prompt researchers to rethink how young children learn to process the world, Marty said. Cognitive development is often viewed as a bottom-up process, with “early visual areas encoding simpler features developing first, and higher-level areas encoding more complex features emerging later.” Rather, he says, brain maturation is “nonhierarchical,” with the more complex ventral visual cortex developing before the lateral occipitotemporal cortex.

The development of these complex structures marks a “really important period of learning.” [infants] It gives them a foundation for thinking about the world,” Cusack says.

O’Doherty said future research would like to examine how long infants remember objects they see, and whether they can recognize relationships between objects from different categories (for example, dogs and cats, bones, etc.).

“We’ve shown they can tell cats apart, but do they know what it is and what it means?” O’Doherty says.