“Investigating human infant knowledge with fMRI”

Hosted by the Deparment of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Abstract: Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the relative roles of built-in structure versus learning in the developing human mind. It is only recently that whole-brain measurements from awake infants have become available to inform these debates. First, I will present data showing that pre-verbal infants’ brains distinguish faces, bodies, and scenes as distinct visual categories. Then, I will focus on faces to ask: do infants’ cortical face responses develop sequentially, first in perceptual regions followed by cognitive regions? I will show that preverbal infants have face-selective responses in temporal and prefrontal regions, suggesting that cortical function develops in parallel. In the last part of my talk I will discuss the implications of these results for understanding infant cognition and typical brain development. 

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