Abstract
After birth, infants’ brains must parse large amounts of sensory input into meaningful signals. Traditional bottom-up, serial models of cortical development suggest that the statistical regularities in sensory input guide development of high-level visual categories. My work shows that infants have face-selective responses in the fusiform face area, scene-selective responses in the parahippocampal place area, and body-selective response in the extrastriate body area. Thus, under a bottom-up, serial account, 2- to 9-months of visual experience must be sufficient to develop category-selective regions. However, behavioral evidence that infants discriminate complex visual features within days of birth and use abstract knowledge to guide where they look poses a substantial problem for the bottom-up view. For example, shortly after birth infants discriminate familiar faces from visually similar unfamiliar faces and choose which faces to spend more time looking at. Consistent with these results, my recent work indicates that 2- to 4-month-old infants have face-selective responses in superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex, regions that support social-emotional cognition in adults. Taken together, a parallel model of cortical development provides a better explanation of these data than traditional bottom-up serial models.