Organization of high-level visual cortex in human infants
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Organization of high.pdf
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Author(s)
Keil, Boris
Deen, Benjamin Matthew
Richardson, Hilary
Dilks, Daniel D
Takahashi, Atsushi
Wald, Lawrence
Kanwisher, Nancy
Saxe, Rebecca R
Date Issued
January 2017
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Deen, Ben; Richardson, Hilary; Dilks, Daniel D.; Takahashi, Atsushi; Keil, Boris; Wald, Lawrence L.; Kanwisher, Nancy and Saxe, Rebecca “Organization of High-Level Visual Cortex in Human Infants.” Nature Communications 8 (January 2017): 13995 © 2017 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
How much of the structure of the human mind and brain is already specified at birth, and how much arises from experience? In this article, we consider the test case of extrastriate visual cortex, where a highly systematic functional organization is present in virtually every normal adult, including regions preferring behaviourally significant stimulus categories, such as faces, bodies, and scenes. Novel methods were developed to scan awake infants with fMRI, while they viewed multiple categories of visual stimuli. Here we report that the visual cortex of 4–6-month-old infants contains regions that respond preferentially to abstract categories (faces and scenes), with a spatial organization similar to adults. However, precise response profiles and patterns of activity across multiple visual categories differ between infants and adults. These results demonstrate that the large-scale organization of category preferences in visual cortex is adult-like within a few months after birth, but is subsequently refined through development.
MIT Department
Harvard University--MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13995
