Overview
- Published in Nature Neuroscience, the peer-reviewed study finds category-level neural organization in 2-month-old infants’ visual processing.
- Researchers scanned 130 awake babies as they viewed images from 12 everyday categories using functional MRI.
- Computational models predicted which category each infant viewed from brain activity, revealing response patterns that resembled adults.
- Follow-up scans around nine months, with usable data from 66 infants, showed a stronger separation of living things from inanimate objects.
- The team used bean bags, noise-cancelling headphones and short sessions to keep babies still, and researchers note potential educational, clinical and AI implications that require further validation.