Premium
Characterizing the information content of a newly hatched chick's first visual object representation
Author(s) -
Wood Justin N.
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12198
Subject(s) - object (grammar) , psychology , cognitive neuroscience of visual object recognition , representation (politics) , identity (music) , communication , cognition , artificial intelligence , visual perception , object permanence , information processing , cognitive psychology , computer vision , pattern recognition (psychology) , computer science , perception , cognitive development , neuroscience , physics , politics , political science , acoustics , law
Abstract How does object recognition emerge in the newborn brain? To address this question, I examined the information content of the first visual object representation built by newly hatched chicks ( Gallus gallus ). In their first week of life, chicks were raised in controlled‐rearing chambers that contained a single virtual object rotating around a single axis. In their second week of life, I tested whether subjects had encoded information about the identity and viewpoint of the virtual object. The results showed that chicks built object representations that contained both object identity information and view‐specific information. However, there was a trade‐off between these two types of information: subjects who were more sensitive to identity information were less sensitive to view‐specific information, and vice versa. This pattern of results is predicted by iterative, hierarchically organized visual processing machinery, the machinery that supports object recognition in adult primates. More generally, this study shows that invariant object recognition is a core cognitive ability that can be operational at the onset of visual object experience.