The study suggests that cognitive development begins far earlier than previously believed, with infants actively processing and categorising the world around them from a very early age.
New research on two-month-old infants shows their brains are far more developed than previously thought, with the ability to distinguish between live objects and inanimate ones.
These findings are from researchers at Trinity College Dublin, whose study analysed the fMRI images of more than 130 babies' brains.
fMRI imaging (Functional magnetic resonance imaging) is a technique that measures changes in blood oxygen levels, allowing researchers to see how our brains respond to different visual stimuli.
The study, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, may eventually help scientists and doctors better understand cognitive development in infancy and also how mental health conditions develop late in life.
How was the study carried out?
The research involved two-month-olds undergoing brain scans while awake. The babies were laid down in a bean bag, with noise-cancelling headphones over their ears, and viewed images from a dozen categories commonly seen in the first year of life.
These images included pictures of cats, birds, rubber ducks, shopping trolleys and trees.
"So when you look at a cat, your brain might fire in a certain way that we can record on the fMRI machine, and that's a signature pattern for the cat. And then if I show you something very different, like an inanimate object, like a tree, your pattern of response could be completely different," explains lead author Cliona O’Doherty.
"And in adults, we know that this is very reliable and consistent, and we can get distinct responses for things like categories or animate and inanimate objects in adults. But we still didn't really know whether this was true in infants yet. So that's exactly what we were looking for in the infants," she added.
In the study, many of the babies returned at nine months, and researchers successfully collected data from 66 of them.
In the nine-month-olds, the brain was able to distinguish living things from inanimate objects more strongly than in the two-month-olds, O'Doherty said.
Why is this study significant?
The study shows that infants' brains, the researchers said, are processing the world in ways that are far more complex than previously assumed.
"Infants know a lot more than we thought that they they did, and their brains are processing the world around them in hugely complex ways. They're not just lying there passively, waiting until they can move around themselves and speak. There's a lot of complex cognitive development happening within the first year of life. And now with this type of method, we can really start to measure that," O’Doherty said.
Gustavo Sudre, a professor of Genomic Neuroimaging and Artificial Intelligence at King’s College London, said the findings could have implications for understanding mental health and neuro-developmental disorders later in life.
"To see that they are forming these representations in their brain much earlier than we thought, and because they don't express that behaviourally, we can see that the brain - that lag that was mentioned before - already has a representation that's not being expressed in their behaviours," he explains.
"And that's very interesting to us specifically when we start talking about mental health disorders, because many times we diagnose a certain disorder based on behaviours, and whatever is causing that in the brain might be there much, much earlier."
