The development of newborn object recognition in fast and slow visual worlds

Object recognition is central to perception and cognition. Yet relatively little is known about the environmental factors that cause invariant object recognition to emerge in the newborn brain. Is this ability a hardwired property of vision? Or does the development of invariant object recognition re...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences Biological sciences, 2016-04, Vol.283 (1829), p.20160166
Main Authors: Wood, Justin N., Wood, Samantha M. W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Animals, Newborn - physiology
Chickens - physiology
Controlled Rearing
High-Throughput
Imprinting, Psychological - physiology
Invariant Object Recognition
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Photic Stimulation
Recognition, Psychology - physiology
Slowness
User-Computer Interface
Visual Perception - physiology
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Summary:Object recognition is central to perception and cognition. Yet relatively little is known about the environmental factors that cause invariant object recognition to emerge in the newborn brain. Is this ability a hardwired property of vision? Or does the development of invariant object recognition require experience with a particular kind of visual environment? Here, we used a high-throughput controlled-rearing method to examine whether newborn chicks (Gallus gallus) require visual experience with slowly changing objects to develop invariant object recognition abilities. When newborn chicks were raised with a slowly rotating virtual object, the chicks built invariant object representations that generalized across novel viewpoints and rotation speeds. In contrast, when newborn chicks were raised with a virtual object that rotated more quickly, the chicks built viewpoint-specific object representations that failed to generalize to novel viewpoints and rotation speeds. Moreover, there was a direct relationship between the speed of the object and the amount of invariance in the chick's object representation. Thus, visual experience with slowly changing objects plays a critical role in the development of invariant object recognition. These results indicate that invariant object recognition is not a hardwired property of vision, but is learned rapidly when newborns encounter a slowly changing visual world.
ISSN:0962-8452
1471-2954
DOI:10.1098/rspb.2016.0166