The Top-down Influence of Object Labels on Infant Steady State Visual Evoked Potentials (ssVEPs)

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

Abstract

Neural representations of faces and objects have previously been found to be modulated by top-down label learning during infancy (e.g., Pickron et al., 2018; Scott & Monesson, 2010; Scott, 2011). In these previous studies, label learning in the home over a three-month period was shown to impact later visual attention and discrimination. It is, however, still unclear whether infant visuo-cortical processing is affected by labeling experiences during a brief learning period and whether the effects of label learning change within infants over time. The present investigation examined the extent to which different types of labels differentially impact perceptual processing and attention over time. In the current study, at 6, 9, and 12 months of age, infants (n= 13) completed an in-lab training during which two different groups of novel objects were either labeled with individual-level (e.g., “Bobby”,”Boris”), or category-level (e.g., “Hitchel”) labels for 5-minutes. Immediately before and after the training, infants viewed concurrent novel exemplars of objects from within the trained categories, as well as an untrained category, superimposed on happy female faces while EEG was recorded. The faces and objects were sinusoidally modulated in contrast against a Brownian noise background at a rate of 5Hz and 6Hz (object/face presentation frequency counterbalanced across subjects). Analysis examined training-related differences across age. Infants’ baseline corrected amplitude (BCA) responses recorded over occipitotemporal regions showed that BCA to objects trained with individual-level labels significantly modulated visuocortical responses over the left occipitotemporal regions from pre- to post-test at 6 months (p=0.007) and at 9 months (p=0.03), but not at 12 months (p=0.30) (see Figure 1). These results suggest that at 6 and 9 months of age briefly being exposed to objects paired with individual-level labels exerts a differential top-down influence on visuocortical responses than objects paired with category-level labels or unlabeled/untrained objects. These top-down impacts on visuocortical responses were left lateralized and the absence of effects at 12-months of age may suggest that the impact of labels on visual processing changes across the first year of life.

Authors

• Ethan Kutlu, University of Iowa
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Pestana, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ryan Barry-Anwar, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Andreas Keil, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author

• Lisa S Scott, University of Florida
  Non-Presenting Author