When Do Babies Begin to Interpret What They See?

Babies can assign objects that they have never seen to the animate or inanimate category at the fourth month.

Babies begin to see and interpret the world just like adults when they are four months old, reveals a new study.

We give meaning to our world through the categorization of objects. When and how does this process begin? The gaze of one hundred infants were studied by scientists at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS/Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1).

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‘Humans are born with a neural organization and are also capable of categorizing objects that are crucial to their survival.’

These findings, published in PNAS, reveal measurable changes in neural organization, which reflect the transition from simply viewing the world to understanding it.

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 color, 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 / Université 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).

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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 organization 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 organization of the adult brain, in the older babies.

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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’ organization of objects into categories increasingly approaches that in the adult brain. Children in this age range immediately recognize a soft, furry object with a face as a nonhuman animal.

This study shows that humans are born with a neural organization predisposed to representing object categories crucial to their survival.

Categorization 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.

Source-Eurekalert