News release

From: Springer Nature

Neuroscience: Infants can visually categorize objects at two months

Human babies may be able to visually categorize different objects earlier than previously thought, even at two months of age, according to research published in Nature Neuroscience. The findings indicate that complex visual processing develops earlier than previously suggested and may inform future approaches to understanding cognitive development in infancy.

Humans learn to recognize and group objects during the first year of life, a process that underpins language acquisition later, but the age at which this ability develops in the brain is unclear. Previous studies have relied on behavioural measures, such as looking time, which can be difficult in younger ages. However, advances in functional brain imaging (fMRI) in awake infants now allow researchers to characterise visual function in early life with better precision.

Cliona O’Doherty and colleagues conducted a large-scale longitudinal fMRI study involving 130 two-month-old infants with a follow-up that included 65 of them at nine months old, with an adult cohort for comparison. Infants viewed images from 12 categories that would commonly be seen in the first year of life (such as animals, objects, and trees) while brain activity was recorded. The authors could predict the object category from brain activity across the visual processing pathway (the ventral visual stream), indicating that infants can categorize objects at two months old, with further refinement by nine months. More specifically, representations of object categories in the infant visual cortex and ventrotemporal cortex were similar to those in adults, even for distinguishing objects according to whether they were animate or inanimate as well as by size. This is despite infants having limited visual acuity and experience of the world.

The results challenge our understanding of visual development in infancy and raise questions about how much of early cortex organization comes from experience versus what is present from birth.