What lies behind a baby’s eyes

The way babies look at the world is a great mystery. What do they really see? What information do they get from seeing? One might think they look at things that stand out the most-by virtue of size or colour, for example. But when do babies begin to see and interpret the world like adults? To answer this question, researchers from the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod (CNRS / Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1) studied one hundred babies aged between 4 and 19 months. The scientists recorded the babies' eye movements and the durations of their gaze as they looked at pairs of pictures representing animate or inanimate things from eight different categories (e.g., human faces and natural or artificial objects). The data obtained from eye tracking on babies were matched with measures of brain activity obtained from a group of adults using fMRI, in order to determine the correspondence between the categorical object organisation emerging from the babies' eyes and that mapped on the adults' visual cortex. The methodology used in the study has revealed the transition from the visual exploration guided by the salience of objects, in the youngest babies, to an object representation towards the mature categorical organisation of the adult brain, in the older babies. Already at four months, babies can distinguish between animate and inanimate objects.