Babies as young as two months old can categorise objects in their brains much earlier than previously thought, according to new research. <\/p>\n
The research comes from scientists at Queen\u2019s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and Stanford University, who were assisted by the Coombe and Rotunda Hospitals in Dublin<\/a>. <\/p>\n They used brain imaging and artificial intelligence models in their study of 130 two-month-old infants.<\/p>\n The babies were shown bright, colourful images for 15 to 20 minutes while lying on a comfy beanbag and wearing sound-cancelling headphones. <\/p>\n The scientists then used functional MRI to measure how their brains responded to pictures of 12 common visual categories such as a cat, bird, rubber duck, shopping cart and tree.<\/p>\n Artificial intelligence models were then used to characterise how the babies\u2019 brains represented the different visual categories. <\/p>\n The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience and was led by a team from Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and the School of Psychology. <\/p>\n Dr Anna Truzzi, from Queen\u2019s University Belfast and a co-author on the paper, said her daughter Maeve took part in the study when she was two months old. <\/p>\n \u201cUntil recently, we could not reliably measure how specific areas of the infant brain interpreted visual information. By combining AI and neuroimaging, our study offers a very unique insight, which helps us to understand much more about how babies learn in their first year of life,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n