Neural dynamics of prediction and surprise in infants

Abstract

Prior expectations shape neural responses in sensory regions of the brain, consistent with a Bayesian predictive coding account of perception. Yet, it remains unclear whether such a mechanism is already functional during early stages of development. To address this issue, we study how the infant brain responds to prediction violations using a cross-modal cueing paradigm. We record electroencephalographic responses to expected and unexpected visual events preceded by auditory cues in 12-month-old infants. We find an increased response for unexpected events. However, this effect of prediction error is only observed during late processing stages associated with conscious access mechanisms. In contrast, early perceptual components reveal an amplification of neural responses for predicted relative to surprising events, suggesting that selective attention enhances perceptual processing for expected events. Taken together, these results demonstrate that cross-modal statistical regularities are used to generate predictions that differentially influence early and late neural responses in infants.

Infants are superior in implicit crossmodal learning and use other learning mechanisms than adults

“…These results demonstrate that infants were able to learn arbitrary crossmodal associations as early as 552 six months of age and thus much earlier than suggested by the study of Kouider et al (2015). Moreover, 553…”

“…The authors interpreted their findings as evidence for top-down mechanisms to 105 be in place as early as six month of age. Kouider et al (2015) exposed twelve-month-old infants to 106 pictures of faces paired with one sound and pictures of flowers paired with another sound. During the 107 test phase the sound preceded the visual stimulus and was either congruent or incongruent with the 108 learned combinations (additionally no sound was used in one third of the trials).…”

“…Two recent studies found that six-month and twelve-month-old infants were 534 able to learn to predict a visual stimulus based on a co-occurring or preceding auditory stimulus 535 (Emberson et al, 2011;Kouider et al, 2015). While Kouider et al (2015) demonstrated that infants at 536 the age of twelve months were able to learn an association between an arbitrary sound and a visual 537 object category (faces vs. flowers), they did not include an adult control group to demonstrate 538 differences in learning between adults and infants, nor were they able to distinguish processes related 539 to the detection of crossmodal combinations and the familiarity with certain sensory elements. 540…”

Infants ask for help when they know they don’t know

“…For instance, during their first year of life, infants rapidly acquire knowledge by examining their physical and social surroundings. They successfully orient toward aspects of the world that defy their expectations, either by violating the physical principles that they have assimilated (9,14) or by contradicting their own probabilistic inferences (8). These behaviors indicate that infants can successfully transform the probability of external events into expectations (8,14).…”

“…They successfully orient toward aspects of the world that defy their expectations, either by violating the physical principles that they have assimilated (9,14) or by contradicting their own probabilistic inferences (8). These behaviors indicate that infants can successfully transform the probability of external events into expectations (8,14). However, children under 4 often fail to provide accurate metacognitive judgments (10)(11)(12)15).…”