One-Shot Object Parsing in Newborn Chicks

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2021-11, Vol.150 (11), p.2408-2420
• Main Authors: Wood, Samantha M. W., Wood, Justin N.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal; Animal Development; Animal Learning; Animals; Artificial Intelligence; Birds; Cognition & reasoning; Humans; Infants (Animal); Learning; Newborn babies; Object Recognition; Psychology; Recognition, Psychology; Vision, Ocular; Visual Perception
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/xge0001043

Controlled-rearing studies provide the unique opportunity to examine which psychological mechanisms are present at birth and which mechanisms emerge from experience. Here we show that one core component of visual perception-the ability to parse objects from backgrounds-is present when newborn animals see their first object. We reared newborn chicks in strictly controlled environments containing a single object on a single background, then tested the chicks' object parsing and recognition abilities. We found that chicks can parse objects from natural backgrounds at the onset of vision, allowing chicks to recognize objects equally well across familiar and novel backgrounds. We also found that the development of object parsing requires motion cues, akin to the development of object parsing in human infants and newly sighted blind patients. These results demonstrate that newborn brains are capable of "one-shot object parsing" and show that motion cues scaffold object perception from the earliest stages of learning. We conclude that prenatal developmental programs build brain architectures with an object-based inductive bias, allowing animals to solve object perception tasks immediately without extensive experience with objects. We discuss the implications of this finding for developmental psychology, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.