Infants’ cortical processing of biological motion configuration – A fNIRS study

Learning non-adjacent rules and non-adjacent dependencies from human actions in 9-month-old infants

“…In the discussion sections of the experiments, we outlined several mutually tenable hypothesis about the mechanisms by which human action stimuli could provide greater support for learning non-adjacent patterns compared to other stimuli. These were, a) focusing attention to the temporal dimension of the stimuli, over which the non-adjacent patterns hold [ 42 ], b) enhancing memory representations due to the familiarity of the human form [ 16 ], and c) the recruitment of motor cortex [ 44 ] and areas specialized for processing biological motion [ 45 , 46 ] when perceiving human action. The candidate mechanisms each facilitate the detection of and memory for non-adjacent patterns, either by enhancing the memory representations, or focusing attention to the temporal dimension of the stimuli.…”

“…Finally, it could be that the specific way human infants process visual information about human forms in action results in enhanced memory representations compared to other stimuli. As we mentioned earlier, recent studies show that processing human actions involve specialized brain regions, including motor cortex [ 44 – 46 ], compared to processing other visual information. This could result in stronger memory encoding and retrieval, which could in turn facilitate the detection of and memory for non-adjacent patterns.…”

“…The familiar human forms could have resulted in stronger memory representations, also facilitating the processing necessary to detect the dependencies. Finally, memory could be facilitated by the recruitment of motor cortical areas [ 44 ] and areas specific to processing biological motion [ 45 , 46 ] as a part of the process of perceiving human forms in action.…”

“…These factors could increase infants' attention to the stimuli, and could cause them to be encoded more deeply. In addition, there is evidence that action observation results in activation of infants' motor areas, as well as other areas specialized for processing biological motion [44][45][46], which could also result in richer encoding, and as a consequence a greater chance of retrieval compared to other types of visual stimuli. Moreover, PLOS ONE some theories posit that the activation of the motor system in perception plays a role in perceptual prediction [47], which could further enhance processing of sequential information.…”

Selective Responses to Faces, Scenes, and Bodies in the Ventral Visual Pathway of Infants

“…To understand development, we need to know whether these regions are present in infants. Research using electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) have reported neural responses in the infant brain to faces [12][13][14] , scenes 14 , and bodies 15,16 , but these studies have used only a single control stimulus type, providing only weak tests of selectivity. Further, these methods lack the spatial resolution to determine if the recorded responses are coming from the FFA, PPA, and EBA.…”