What lies behind a baby's eyes

Date:
February 16, 2022
Source:
CNRS
Summary:
We give meaning to our world through the categorization of
objects. When and how does this process begin? By studying the gaze
of one hundred infants, scientists have demonstrated that, by the
age of fourth months, babies can assign objects that they have
never seen to the animate or inanimate category. These findings
reveal measurable changes in neural organization, which reflect
the transition from simply viewing the world to understanding it.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
We give meaning to our world through the categorisation of objects. When
and how does this process begin? By studying the gaze of one hundred
infants, scientists at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/ Universite' Claude Bernard Lyon 1) have demonstrated that, by the
age of fourth months, babies can assign objects that they have never seen
to the animate or inanimate category. These findings, published in PNAS on
15 February 2022, reveal measurable changes in neural organisation, which reflect the transition from simply viewing the world to understanding it.


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The way babies look at the world is a great mystery. What do they really
see? What information do they get from seeing? One might think they
look at things that stand out the most -- by virtue of size or colour,
for example. But when do babies begin to see and interpret the world
like adults? To answer this question, researchers from the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS / Universite' Claude Bernard
Lyon 1) studied one hundred babies aged between 4 and 19 months. The
scientists recorded the babies' eye movements and the durations of
their gaze as they looked at pairs of pictures representing animate or inanimate things from eight different categories (e.g., human faces and
natural or artificial objects). The data obtained from eye tracking
on babies were matched with measures of brain activity obtained from
a group of adults using fMRI, in order to determine the correspondence
between the categorical object organisation emerging from the babies'
eyes and that mapped on the adults' visual cortex.

The methodology used in the study has revealed the transition from the
visual exploration guided by the salience of objects, in the youngest
babies, to an object representation towards the mature categorical
organisation of the adult brain, in the older babies. Already at four
months, babies can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects. For instance, they can tell that a man and a crocodile, being animals,
are more similar to each other than they are to a tree, which is an
inanimate object. This ability appears astonishing as, at that age,
babies are unlikely to know what a tree or crocodile is.

Between 10 and 19 months of age, more refined categories emerge and the infants' organisation of objects into categories increasingly approaches
that in the adult brain. Children in this age range immediately recognise
a soft, furry object with a face as a nonhuman animal.

This study* shows that humans are born with a neural organisation
predisposed to representing object categories crucial to their
survival. Categorisation is the mechanism that enables us to go beyond
what we see and make inferences, analogies, and predictions -- for
example, if that "soft, furry object" is a cat, it needs to be fed --
and thus think about the world around us, from the earliest age.

*Funded by the European Research Council (THEMPO, 758473) and the Fyssen Foundation in Paris.

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========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Ce'line Spriet, Etienne Abassi, Jean-Re'my Hochmann, Liuba
Papeo. Visual
object categorization in infancy. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (8): e2105866119 DOI:
10.1073/pnas.2105866119 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/02/220216112257.htm

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