Retinotopic organization of visual cortex in human infants

Abstract

Vision develops rapidly during infancy, yet how visual cortex is organized during this period is unclear. One possibility is that the retinotopic organization of visual cortex emerges gradually as perceptual abilities improve. This may result in a hierarchical maturation of visual areas from striate to extrastriate cortex. Another possibility is that retinotopic organization is present from early infancy. This early maturation of area boundaries and tuning could scaffold further developmental changes. Here we test the functional maturity of infant visual cortex by performing retinotopic mapping with fMRI. Infants aged 5-23 months had retinotopic maps, with alternating preferences for vertical and horizontal meridians indicative of area boundaries from V1 to V4, and an orthogonal gradient of preferences from high to low spatial frequencies indicative of growing receptive field sizes. Although present in the youngest infants, these retinotopic maps showed subtle age-related changes, suggesting that early maturation undergoes continued refinement.

Perception of an object’s global shape is best described by a model of skeletal structure in human infants

“…Interestingly, representations of skeletal structures in V3 are invariant across changes in component parts, which lends support to their role in categorization ( Ayzenberg et al, 2022 ; Lescroart and Biederman, 2013 ). Other research on the anatomical and functional organization of V3 in primates shows evidence of functional maturity shortly after birth ( Arcaro and Livingstone, 2017 ; Ellis et al, 2020 ; Wiesel and Hubel, 1974 ), further raising the possibility that skeletal structure is represented in this area with little object experience or any language.…”

What neuroimaging methods can tell us about perceptual development

“…Despite this ambiguity, recent fMRI evidence from awake infants confirms that the basic neural substrate is similar in infants and adults, at least as defined by spatially homologous regions of interest (ROI). For example, the spatial configuration of retinotopic cortical maps in primary visual areas are similarly organized in infants and adults (Ellis et al, 2021c), and cortical areas activated by motion stimuli in adults are also present in infants as young as 5 weeks of age (Biagi et al, 2015(Biagi et al, , 2023. However, there are multiple neural pathways for processing motion stimuli, including a sub-cortical pathway, and the relative balance of these pathways that contribute to the behavioral indices of motion perception remains unclear (Rosander et al, 2007).…”

The development of visual cognition: The emergence of spatial congruency bias

“…In addition, behavioral results from studies investigating object recognition in early development have yielded ample evidence that infants in general were more likely to encode, represent, and prioritize spatial information over featural information such as color, shape, and/or identity, implying location information is favored in very early development (Ayzenberg et al., 2021; Kibbe & Leslie, 2011; Xu & Carey, 1996). And finally, topographical maps of spatial location are present in newborn non‐human primates (Arcaro & Livingstone, 2017, 2021), 5‐month‐old infants (Ellis et al., 2020), and young children (Dekker et al., 2019), suggesting the existence of robust spatial information from early development, though it is unknown if this precedes or dominates the neural development of non‐spatial information. Taken together, the reviewed evidence suggests that the SCB could simply be a manifestation of this neural prioritization, and we would expect it to be present early in development, with young children exhibiting the same asymmetric congruency bias pattern as adults.…”