Cliona O'Doherty

Infant brain categorizes common objects by two months of age Brain activity patterns in the ventral visual cortex appear to distinguish images across 12 categories, including birds and trees, fMRI scans suggest.

The Transmitter writes about @clionaod.bsky.social's work with
@ainedineen.bsky.social, @annatruzzi.bsky.social, Graham King, @lorinanaci.bsky.social, Keelin Harrison, Enna-Louise D'Arcy, Jessica White, @chiarac.bsky.social, Tamrin Holloway, Anna Kravchenko, @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Awake Infants: Insights From More Than 750 Scanning Sessions Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants has the potential to reveal how the early developing brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. However, awake infant fMRI poses signifi....

Awake infant fMRI offers a rare window into early brain and cognitive development. In a new paper out now in Infancy, we leverage data from hundreds of infant scans from the Saxe and Turk-Browne Labs to reveal what factors drive scanning success — and how future studies can maximize data retention!

Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age - Nature Neuroscience Using infant fMRI, the authors show that, by 2 months of age, representations in high-level visual cortex encode visual categories that align with deep neural networks, and lateral object-selective regions are later to develop.

Human babies may be able to visually categorize different objects earlier than previously thought, even at two months of age, according to research published in Nature Neuroscience. The results challenge our understanding of visual development in infancy:

#Neuroscience #Neuroskyence 🧠

We didn't look at faces vs. other categories. But previous work (www.cell.com/current-biol... and elifesciences.org/articles/100... for example) has shown this is present from an early age. In another of our tasks not presented in this article, we find similar patterns for faces using videos.

Of course! The dataset, including our stimuli, is openly available. You can find it here: openneuro.org/datasets/ds0...

7/7 Funded by @erc.europa.eu&@researchireland.ie. Thank you to the families, the Coombe & Rotunda hospitals, and the team: @rhodricusack.bsky.social, @ainedineen.bsky.social,Anna Truzzi,Graham King @lorijn.bsky.social,@chiarac.bsky.social,@ennadarcy.bsky.social,@diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social +more!

Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age - Nature Neuroscience Using infant fMRI, the authors show that, by 2 months of age, representations in high-level visual cortex encode visual categories that align with deep neural networks, and lateral object-selective re...

6/7 Our results further highlight the first year of life as a time of intricate brain function. Infants possess the foundations of visual cognition to group the world from very early on. Read more in Nature Neuroscience! 📖🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41....

5/7 Not all visual regions mature early. 🚧 We found that LO, a key object-selective region in adults, is much later to show reliable visual representations. This suggests non-hierarchical development: category structure appears in the ventrotemporal cortex prior to the lateral occipital cortex.

4/7 👶 Awake fMRI was successful in 97% of infants at 2 months of age. When infants returned at 9 months, we were successful 64% of the time. Many babies completed 10+ mins of awake scanning, and motion was present - but manageable. The dataset is available at openneuro.org/datasets/ds0....

3/7 How complex are these visual representations? Using DNNs, we found the expected hierarchical match between the developing brain and neural network models. Infant VVC was most similar to deep layers of fully trained models, revealing that objects are processed using high-level features. 🤖📊

2/7 Using RSA, we find that the infant brain can process objects with a high degree of feature complexity. At 2 months of age, VVC has distinct response patterns for category and animacy - before they are detectable in behavior. This category structure is refined throughout the first year.

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n

It's been a great FIT'NG so far 🧠👶🏻 I'm always excited to present the work from the amazing FOUNDCOG team, and chat all things developmental cog comp neuro. Feel free to reach out to me or find me on the last day tomorrow!

Hi, we will have three NeuroAI postdoc openings (3 years each, fully funded) to work with Sebastian Musslick (@musslick.bsky.social), Pascal Nieters and myself on task-switching, replay, and visual information routing.

Reach out if you are interested in any of the above, I'll be at CCN next week!

This was so fun to write! Grateful to ICIS and the Baby Blog for the space to reflect on infant memory

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances!

We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime

doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Defending the foundation model view of infant development

Thanks to fellow defenders @clionaod.bsky.social, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, and @charvetcj.bsky.social

Defending the foundation model view of infant development www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excited for CCN this year! The lineup is full of super interesting developmental work👶🏻🧠🤖 Looking forward to presenting my results as a contributed talk as well!

Dimensions underlying the representational alignment of deep neural networks with humans - Nature Machine Intelligence An interpretability framework that compares how humans and deep neural networks process images has been presented. Their findings reveal that, unlike humans, deep neural networks focus more on visual ...

What makes humans similar or different to AI? In a paper out in @natmachintell.nature.com led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @lukasmut.bsky.social, w/ Umut Güclü, we took a deep look at the factors underlying their representational alignment, with surprising results.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

2 PHD-STUDENTS IN NEUROAI OF DEVELOPMENTAL VISION (M/F/X) - Academic Positions Join an interdisciplinary team to research developmental vision in NeuroAI. Requires a strong computational background, deep learning skills, and a Master's ...

There are 2 PhD positions in my lab in Amsterdam (collaboration with Sander Bohte, @tessamdekker.bsky.social and Ingmar Visser) on NeuroAI of developmental vision.

academicpositions.nl/ad/centrum-w...

Thinking about brain development is hard ... but modern computational models can hint towards potential learning mechanisms! Of course, these need to be contextualised within the findings from developmental psychology. Check out the discussion out now in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Please help: Do you know a baby, less than 12 months old, who can walk? We are trying to complete a project, 7 years in the works. And all we need are 3 infants who are less than a year old and can walk, to do a short online looking-time study.
🆘

Fascinating talk by @rhodricusack.bsky.social showing his & @clionaod.bsky.social’s work on 2 and 9-month olds with 130 (!) infants & 20 min (!) data showing a largely similar representation of medial ventral vision but a largely absent response in LO, dovetailing with myelin development. #CAOS2025

"How infants learn and explore: From behavior to computations" 👶⚙️

This review outlines my take on early development, mostly driven by frustration that infancy research focuses on what infants can do, not how.

Still a Preprint! Missing-literature suggestions welcome :)

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Incredible Tristan 😍

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What infant fMRI is revealing about the developing mind Cognitive neuroscientists have finally clocked how to perform task-based fMRI experiments in awake babies. Now they want watch cognition take shape.

A brave (and patient) group of neuroscientists have figured out how to do task-based fMRI in babies and toddlers. They aim to uncover how the infant mind takes shape—and the method has already provided new insight into infantile amnesia. My latest www.thetransmitter.org/cognitive-ne... #neuroskyence

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu).

Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993).

Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025.

Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

JOB ALERT: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postdoc position in Osaka, Japan! Plus PhD positions for April 2026. PLEASE REPOST! #postdocjobs #neuroskyence #neuroscience #psychscisky #compneurosky

We had to re-start the process after our preferred candidate withdrew. Info 👇.