Butterfly effects in perceptual development: A review of the ‘adaptive initial degradation’ hypothesis

Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues

“…It is relevant to note that we recently obtained results attesting to the potential benefits of the initially low visual acuity that infants experience after birth and of low-pass filtered audio inputs as part of prenatal hearing ( 46 – 48 ). Thus, we believe that the results we are presenting in this paper are a special case of a broader set of phenomena consistent with the possibility that early perceptual limitations may be the subtle precursors that manifest in due time as salutary effects on perceptual skills.…”

Contributions of dysfunctional plasticity mechanisms to the development of atypical perceptual processing

“…Altered perceptual processes can disrupt an individual's interactions with their environment, and with others, which may result in altered conceptual representations unique to their own experiences, leading to cascades of idiosyncratic effects (Kiefer et al, 2007;Mercado et al, 2020;Vogelsang et al, 2024). Neuroimaging studies show that children with ASD have atypical plasticity in neural representations during problem-solving tasks compared with TD children (Liu et al, 2023).…”

“…Even individuals with shared abnormalities in plasticity mechanisms may show highly divergent trajectories in neural development, because of experience-dependent plasticity (deVillers-Sidani & Merzenich, 2011). Computational studies with neural networks show that initial conditions can strongly impact learning-related changes in the connections between neurons, as well as a network's capacity to learn and generalize (Elman, 1993;Kolen & Pollack, 1990;Vogelsang et al, 2024).…”

“…For instance, initial sensory biases interacting with early experiences can promote or exacerbate hyper-and hyposensitivities to sensory stimulation. Variations in the salience of different sensory inputs can, in turn, lead to asymmetries in cross-modal monitoring and integration, avoidance or ignorance of subsets of inputs, and difficulties forming and generalizing associations between subsets of events, creating a cascade of atypical sensory and perceptual learning trajectories that are difficult or impossible to reverse (Vogelsang et al, 2024). Mismatches between the perceptual experiences of children and their peers or adults can lead to cognitive difficulties, such that neural and behavioral heterogeneity is part of the progression of NDDs (i.e., a consequence of experience-dependent and learning-related cortical plasticity).…”