What goes on in the minds of tiny newborns?   With our great-grandchildren,  newest one just arrived, I look into their eyes – and see curiosity about the world they just entered, and intelligence – they are making sense of it, right from the start!

Science Daily reports that neuroscientists at Trinity College, Dublin, let by Dr. Cliona O’Doherty, have shown that “babies as young as two months old can already organize what they see into distinct object categories”.*

O’Doherty, C., Dineen, Á. T., Truzzi, A., King, G., Zaadnoordijk, L., Harrison, K., … & Cusack, R. (2026). Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age. Nature Neuroscience, 1-10.

O’Doherty observes, “parents and scientists have long wondered what goes on in a baby’s mind and what they actually see when they view the world around them.  [Our] research highlights the richness of brain function in the first year of life.” O’Doherty is now at Stanford University.

After running brain scans, the researchers used AI models to analyze how different visual categories were represented in the infant brain. Team leader Rhodri Cusack concludes, “babies learn much more quicky than today’s AI models and by studying how they do this we hope to inspire a new generation of AI models that learn more efficiently…”

There is some irony here.  Humans are learning from AI algorithms.  Now, perhaps, we can help AI learn better and faster – by studying how tiny babies do it.

The study recruited 130 infants, all two-months old; each lay on a comfortable beanbag, while wearing sound-cancelling headphones and viewing bright, colorful images designed to hold their attention for 15-20 minutes. [Remark:  Wow. Many of our teenagers have much shorter attention spans,  perhaps….8 seconds – that of a goldfish?]. Functional MRI  [fMRI] recorded patterns of images, like cat, bird, rubber duck, shopping cart and tree. fMRI scans revealed the patterns along visual recognition pathways.)

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)