ArticleNature neuroscience2026
Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age.
Article in Nature neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The cerebellum specializes for language even in the absence of contralateral neocortical inputs.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex.Communications biology · 2026Article
- The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Fusiform face area development correlates with development in higher-order social brain regions.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Category selectivity observed in the human brain is distinct from category selectivity observed in artificial neural networks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Parallel processing chains span cytoarchitectures to organize association cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Deep learning in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
What are the foundations of visual categories in the human brain? Although infant looking behavior characterizes the development of overt categorization, it cannot measure neural representation or distinguish the underlying mechanism. For this, we need rich neuroimaging from young infants and the capacity to apply advanced computational models of vision. In this study, we conducted an awake functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of more than 100 2-month-old infants, with follow-ups at 9 months, finding that categorical structure is present in high-level visual cortex from 2 months of age. This precedes its emergence in lateral visual cortex, suggesting non-hierarchical development of category representations. A deep neural network model aligned with infants' representational geometry, indicating that the features comprising infants' category template span a range of complexities and can be learned from the statistics of visual input. Our results reveal the existence of complex function in ventral visual cortex at 2 months of age and describe the early development of category perception.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.