No abstract

Visual categorization is a human core cognitive capacity that depends on the development of visual category representations in the infant brain. The nature of infant visual category representations and their relationship to the corresponding adult form however remain unknown. Our results clarify the nature of visual category representations in 6-to 8-month-old infants and their developmental trajectory towards adult maturity in the key characteristics temporal dynamics, representational format, and spectral properties. Temporal dynamics change from slowly emerging, developing representations in infants to quickly emerging, complex representations in adults. Despite those differences infants and adults already partly share visual category representations. The format of infants’ representations are visual features of low to intermediate complexity, whereas adults’ representations also encoded high complexity features. Theta band neural oscillations form the basis of visual category representations in infants, and these representations are shifted to the alpha/beta band in adults.