Top-down knowledge rapidly acquired through abstract rule learning biases subsequent visual attention in 9-month-old infants

Visual attention is an information-gathering mechanism that supports the emergence of complex perceptual and cognitive capacities. Yet, little is known about how the infant brain learns to direct attention to information that is most relevant for learning and behavior. Here we address this gap by examining whether learning a hierarchical rule structure, where there is a higher-order feature that organizes visual inputs into predictable sequences, subsequently biases 9-month-old infants' visual attention to the higher-order visual feature. In Experiment 1, we found that individual differences in infants' ability to structure simple visual inputs into generalizable rules was related to the change in infants' attention biases towards higher-order features. In Experiment 2, we found that increased functional connectivity between the PFC and visual cortex was related to the efficacy of rule learning. Moreover, Granger causality analyses provided exploratory evidence that increased functional connectivity reflected PFC influence over visual cortex. These findings provide new insights into how the infant brain learns to flexibly select features from the cluttered visual world that were previously relevant for learning and behavior.