Summary: Researchers have discovered a key aspect of infant vision, revealing that very young babies experience a unique visual diet of simple, high-contrast patterns and edges found in everyday environments. This “regime” considerably influences their development trajectory.
Their study used head-mounted cameras on infants to directly observe and analyze visual stimuli in their everyday environment, comparing them to adults’ perceptions. These results not only advance our understanding of human visual development, but also offer avenues for improving AI visual systems through similar stepwise learning processes.
Highlights:
- Single visual input: Infants are naturally attracted to and surrounded by highly contrasting patterns in their daily environment, which are crucial for their visual development.
- Impact on AI learning: The study’s methodology and results are applied to improve visual artificial intelligence systems, showing that AI trained on image sequences mimicking infants’ visual experiences performs better.
- Broader implications: This research provides insight into how early visual experiences are optimized for developmental progress and could lead to better early intervention strategies for visual abnormalities.
Source: Indiana University
What do infants see? What are they looking at?
The answers to these questions are very different for younger babies than for older infants, children, and adults. Characterized by a few highly contrasting edges in simple patterns, these early scenes also contain the materials necessary to build a solid foundation for human vision.
This is the result of a new study entitled “An edge-simplicity bias in the visual input to young infants”, published on May 10 in Scientists progress by IU researchers Erin Anderson, Rowan Candy, Jason Gold and Linda Smith.
“The starting assumption of everyone who thinks about the role of experience in visual development has always been that on the scale of everyday experience, visual input is roughly the same for everyone “, explains lead researcher Linda Smith, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
“Yet this study says no, visual input changes with development. It’s not the same for everyone. The daily life of very young infants seems to be unique at this age.
Previous laboratory and clinical studies had shown that young infants preferred to look at simple, high-contrast scenes of large black stripes and checkerboards. The present study is the first to ask to what extent these preferences constitute their contribution to daily life.
“To see what young babies are seeing and looking at,” says Anderson, a former postdoctoral researcher in Smith’s Cognitive Development Lab, she and her colleagues installed head-mounted cameras on infants to wear at home during activities of daily life.
“You can buy ‘baby flash cards’ for newborns that show these simple, high-contrast images,” she explains.
“What the front-facing camera videos show, what this work shows, is that young infants find these types of images all around them in their daily lives, just by looking at things like lights and corners. from the ceiling.”
“What we discovered is a very special, early ‘diet’ for visual development,” Smith adds. “As with nutrition, young infants do not start with rich and complex meals or pizzas, but rather with a simple and developmentally appropriate diet.”
Previous work has recognized the critical nature of this early period for the future development of human vision. For example, infants born with visual abnormalities such as cataracts or those living in orphanages with limited visual experiences have been shown to suffer permanent visual impairments.
The present study offers some preliminary data to address these shortcomings. This also has important implications for the creation of visual AI systems, which also acquire stronger visual skills when training begins with the same simple, contrasting visual content.
“The massive scale of the contributions of daily life”
To identify properties of visual input in infants aged approximately three to 13 months, researchers placed head-mounted video cameras on 10 infants and 10 of their adult caregivers, collecting and analyzing 70 hours of visual documentation of daily life at home.
Clear differences emerged between the content of infants’ and adults’ images, with a higher concentration of simple patterns and high-contrast edges in infants’ views than in adults’ views.
Smith infers that the reason for these views is not just that infants will turn their heads to look at features of the world they can see, but that parents or caregivers are likely to place them in places where they like look at things.
“You have to think about why they are there. There is probably some implicit natural knowledge on the part of parents that allows them to leave their children where they like to look at things. Mom won’t bother you if you don’t make a fuss,” she observes.
Yet is this small group of participants from Bloomington, Indiana, representative of infants around the world? To answer this question, Smith’s lab conducted the same experiment with a collaborator in a small, crowded fishing village in Chennai, India, where electricity is minimal and much of daily life takes place outdoors. ‘outside.
And while the front-facing camera images of the 6- and 12-month-olds looked very different from those of their Bloomington counterparts, the younger infants share a common “diet” of high-contrast edges and simple patterns in Chennai and Bloomington. .
Bigger pictures, past and future
Smith and colleagues also showed that the same sequence of images improves the training of visual AI systems. As a follow-up to the current study, published in 2023 Proceedings of the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, they found that if you train an AI system by first feeding it images characteristic of early childhood, it is more successful at learning to identify visual images than if you feed it images in a random developmental order or if you simply provide him with typical images of everyday adult life. . The most precise development sequence produced the best results.
Their work opens new avenues for evolutionary speculation. As Smith explains: “One of the questions I always asked as a graduate student – and maybe we have an opportunity to answer it – is why human babies have such motor development slow.
“They spend about three months just listening and watching, then another six months with a little posture and head control. Why are they so slow? The horses go out and run races.
This research suggests that “over evolutionary time, these slow, gradual, optimized biases help build a very intelligent visual and auditory system,” she says. “It’s a story that could be told.”
In the meantime, their work raises new questions about early childhood visual content and its role in the development of the visual system, whether human or AI.
Other researchers include IU Bloomington professor Rowan Candy, School of Optometry, and Jason Gold, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
About this news from research in vision and neurodevelopment
Author: Liz Rosdeitcher
Source: Indiana University
Contact: Liz Rosdeitcher – Indiana University
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Free access.
“An edge simplicity bias in young infants’ visual input” by Erin Anderson et al. Scientists progress
Abstract
An edge simplicity bias in visual input to young infants
The development of sparse edge coding in mammalian visual cortex depends on early visual experience. In humans, there are many indicators that the statistics of early visual experiences have unique properties that may support these developments.
However, there are no direct measures of the marginal statistics of the infant’s daily experience.
Using head-mounted cameras to capture egocentric images of young infants and adults at home, we found that infant images had distinct edge statistics compared to adults. For infants, scenes with sparse contour patterns (few contours and few orientations) dominate.
The findings imply a biased early contribution to the scale of daily life, likely specific to the first months after birth, and provide insight into the quality, quantity and timing of visual experiences during the fundamental developmental period. of human vision.
News Source : neurosciencenews.com
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