Top-down Factors Shape Infant Vision: Neural and Behavioral Evidence

• In Event: How Top-down Influences Shape Visual Development from Infancy to Childhood

Abstract

Visual development has largely been considered as either a bottom-up, input-driven process or one shaped by maturational constraints, such as biologically-determined critical periods. While top-down factors may be an important third avenue, it has been argued that top-down factors emerge later in development (e.g., Amso & Schierf, 2015). However, across several studies using both neural and behavioral measures, we’ve found strikingly convergent evidence that young infants’ visual system is rapidly shaped by top-down influences. These findings suggest that vision can be top-down even starting very early in life and therefore top-down factors need to be incorporated into current theories.
Top-down processes are distinct from either bottom-up experience or maturational constraints as they arise rapidly (in mere minutes of exposure), and result in highly flexible, contextually-specific changes in vision. We have found evidence for top-down influences in motion perception, emotional face perception, face detection (temporal processing of faces) and, most recently, visual illusions. Focusing on the latter study, infants have previously been found to exhibit the Rubin’s vase (face-vase) illusion. We found that if infants learned that a particular auditory cue predicted seeing a face, their scanning patterns of the Rubin’s vase were more face-like than if they heard a tone that predicted seeing a vase. We find this evidence using both traditional area of interest (AOI) analyses as well as machine learning methods that use classification, data-driven techniques. This finding provides evidence that an infant’s visual response to sensory input can be rapidly and flexibly modified through learned predictive cues.
Moreover, the frontal cortex is a key system involved in these top-down changes in infant vision. These rapid, context-dependent effects are top-down because feedback neural connections are necessary for vision to be modified. In particular, a series of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) studies have pointed to the frontal cortex as being the origin of these signals. Using a computational learning model to model neuroimaging data, we found that the prefrontal cortex is involved in both tracking complex patterns as well as exerting top-down control over perceptual cortices. Recent findings have confirmed the co-modulation of the frontal lobe and perceptual cortices as full-term infants learn to predict upcoming sensory input. Finally, a recent replication and extension of this work points to a role for the attentional system in these top-down effects (i.e., the frontal and parietal lobe are strongly coupled during prediction).
These findings suggest that top-down processes are a potentially powerful factor influencing visual development starting early in infancy. Moreover, this work reveals infant visual perception to be highly flexible and context-dependent with rapid changes, even on a trial-by-trial basis, in a way that is only possible through top-down factors. Overall, this work shifts the theoretical landscape and challenges us to consider how top-down factors may be involved, along with bottom-up factors and maturational constraints, in the development of the visual system.

Authors

• Lauren L. Emberson, Princeton University
  Presenting Author

• Sori Baek, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sagi Jaffe-Dax, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Fernanda Fernandez
  Non-Presenting Author

• Anna Herbolzheimer, Princeton University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Naiqi G Xiao, McMaster University
  Non-Presenting Author