Summary: New research shows that babies as young as three months can detect and generalize visual patterns simply by observing the world around them.
Source: Northwestern University.
Three-month-old infants, who cannot yet sit up or roll over, are already capable of learning abstract visual patterns from what they see, according to a Northwestern University study published in PLOS ONE.
Researchers report for the first time that 3- and 4-month-old infants can identify recurring visual patterns and apply those patterns to new sequences they have not previously observed.
Detecting objects and events is important across the animal kingdom, but recognizing the relations among elements — the patterns and rules that structure experience — is especially crucial for human cognition. Humans are able to abstract a rule learned in one domain and apply it in another: for example, recognizing an alternating pattern of lights and then identifying the same alternating pattern in a sequence of sounds. This capacity, called abstract rule learning, is a foundational cognitive skill, but its developmental origins have been unclear.
Earlier studies showed that 4-month-old infants could abstract patterns from speech and tones yet appeared to fail at the same task when patterns were presented visually, such as with sequences of objects. That discrepancy raised a question: why do infants readily extract abstract patterns from auditory input but not from visual sequences?
New work from Sandra Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology at Northwestern, along with former doctoral student Brock Ferguson and Steven Franconeri, professor of psychology, provides a solution to this puzzle. The team argues that auditory and visual systems have different perceptual strengths: the auditory system excels at patterns that unfold over time, while the visual system is better at extracting patterns when multiple elements can be perceived simultaneously in space.
“If you present stimuli in a way that suits the visual system, infants can learn abstract rules visually just as they do from speech,” said Brock Ferguson.
In the study, forty infants were shown sequences composed of pictures of different dog breeds. For example, an “ABA” pattern would display an Alaskan malamute (A), then a German shepherd (B), then the Alaskan malamute again (A). Infants viewed several ABA sequences using different dog images each time. After familiarization, researchers presented two new sequences that used entirely new dog images: one followed the previously seen ABA pattern and the other followed a different AAB pattern. Because the images themselves were identical across the two test sequences, any preference in the infants’ looking time could be attributed to recognition of the underlying pattern rather than to the specific images.
Infants reliably distinguished the patterns, showing that they had formed an abstract rule about the sequence structure and could generalize it to novel visual items. This finding provides evidence that even very young infants can learn abstract visual rules when the visual information is presented in a spatially organized format that the visual system can readily process.
Waxman explained that the difference between prior visual and auditory findings reflects the ways these systems process information: auditory learning often depends on sequences that unfold over time, such as language or music, whereas visual pattern extraction is optimized when multiple elements are available at once and arranged in space. In the current experiment, infants were able to view the three images together on the screen, allowing the visual system to detect relational structure across items.
“Auditory learning can pick up patterns like ABB or ABA from temporal sequences, but the visual system benefits from seeing the elements simultaneously,” said Waxman. “This study shows that the roots of abstract rule learning are present very early in infancy.”
The authors conclude that the capacity to abstract and generalize structural rules emerges in infancy, supporting the idea that powerful forms of abstraction begin with simple observation and perceptual organization in the first months of life.
Source: Hilary Hurd Anyaso, Northwestern University
Publisher: NeuroscienceNews.com
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image in the public domain
Original Research: Open access research in PLOS ONE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0190185
Very young infants learn abstract rules in the visual modality
Abstracting the structure or “rules” that underlie observed patterns is essential to mature cognition, yet prior infant research suggested this ability was limited to specific types of stimuli. Infants successfully extract rules from auditory sequences such as language, but have previously failed when rules were presented as visual sequences. The researchers propose that this discrepancy reflects differences in how the auditory and visual systems interface with cognition: the auditory system extracts patterns from time-ordered sequences, while the visual system is attuned to patterns organized in space. The study provides evidence with adults and then demonstrates developmental continuity: infants as young as three months learn abstract rules visually when sequences are arranged spatially. This offers the earliest evidence to date of abstract rule learning in any modality.