Early development of top-down perceptual modulations in infancy

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One of the major goals of human development is to adapt to the environment. This adaptation process first manifests in our perceptual capacities as early as infancy. Over the first few months, perception becomes increasingly specialized to process the most representative information in the environment. For example, while 3-month-olds can discriminate a wide range of stimuli, by 9 to 12 months of age, they can only discriminate familiar stimuli (e.g., own-race faces and native speeches) but lose the ability to differentiate unfamiliar other-race faces or non-native speeches. Though such experience-based early development has been consistently reported over decades, the mechanisms that translate sensory experiences into infants' perceptual capacities are less clear. Instead of viewing early perceptual development as the result of passive exposure to particular types of sensory input, the current program focuses on the ability to actively utilize experiences to shape perception in the first year of life. This capacity is referred to as top-down perceptual modulation, where the learned knowledge can be actively used to modulate related perceptual systems, therefore leading to optimal perceptual outcomes. For example, after hearing a dog bark, our visual system will be prepared to process dog related visual information, which results in an augmented perception of dogs. The current program aims to investigate how top-down perceptual modulation, which will be probed neurally in the brain and behaviourally in infants' eye movement patterns, supports the early development of perception in neonates and infants. The proposed studies present a novel theoretical advance regarding early perceptual development. The results will reveal the neural mechanisms underlying the top-down perceptual modulation at birth, which allows infants to leverage their expanding knowledge about the world into adaptive changes in perceptual abilities. Moreover, the findings will inform the creation of evidence-based early intervention programs that target the root cause of developmental delay, such as those caused by premature birth.