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What does a two-month-old already know?
Human infants are born helpless and stay that way for longer than any other species. For a long time this was read as a sign that the newborn brain is a blank slate, to be filled in slowly by experience. Our work suggests something different: infants are building foundational representations of the world from the first weeks of life, and doing so remarkably fast. Understanding what those representations are, how they are learned, and what happens when the process is disrupted is the central question of the lab. What we've found Using awake infant fMRI, we have shown that by two months of age the ventral visual stream already contains rich, organised representations of visual categories, structured in ways that resemble the adult brain (O'Doherty et al., 2026, Nature Neuroscience; see also the accompanying research briefing). These representations are not static: visual experience over the first year shapes the connections between visual cortex and the rest of the brain (Tian et al., 2026, eLife). And the information infants extract from continuous visual experience is more about objects than about scenes or context, which constrains what kind of learner an infant must be. |
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Taken together with our theoretical work, this points to a view of the infant as something like a foundation model in training: a system that learns general-purpose representations from unlabelled experience before it can act on the world (Cusack, Ranzato & Charvet, 2024, Trends in Cognitive Sciences).
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How we study it
We scan infants awake, at 2 and 9 months, while they watch naturalistic videos and look at pictures; the methods are described on the [Neuroimaging methods] page. We track where infants look, in the scanner and online through the webcam, and we follow cohorts across the first year. Because neuroimaging alone cannot tell us what an infant's experience is like, we pair every imaging study with computational models that make explicit, testable predictions about what representations should be present at each age; see the [NeuroAI] page. Current projects
Where it is going InfantNeuroAI, funded by a €3.5M ERC Advanced Grant, extends this to the whole of the first year and to faster brain dynamics with OPM-MEG. We are recruiting; see vacancies. |
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