Infants can use expectations about the world to rapidly shape their developing brains, according to new research.
A series of experiments with infants 5 to 7 months old shows that portions of their brains responsible for visual processing respond not only to the presence of visual stimuli, but also to the mere expectation of visual stimuli, a type of complex neural processing that was once thought to happen only in adults.
“We show that in situations of learning and situations of expectations, babies are in fact able to really quickly use their experience to shift the ways different areas of their brain respond to the environment,” says Lauren Emberson, who conducted the study at the Baby Lab at the University of Rochester when she was a research associate in the brain and cognitive sciences department.
Baby Expectations
For the study, researchers exposed one group of infants to a sequential pattern that included a sound—like a honk from a clown horn or a rattle—followed by an image of a red cartoon smiley face. Another group saw and heard the same things, but without any pattern.
