Cortical responses to shape-from-motion stimuli in the infant

Amy Hirshkowitz; Marisa Biondi; Teresa Wilcox

doi:10.1117/1.NPh.5.1.011014

11 October 2017 Cortical responses to shape-from-motion stimuli in the infant

Amy Hirshkowitz, Marisa Biondi, Teresa Wilcox

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Funded by: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)

Neurophotonics, Vol. 5, Issue 1, 011014 (October 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.5.1.011014

Abstract

Our ability to extract three-dimensional (3-D) object structure from motion-carried information is a basic visual capacity that is fundamental to object perception. Despite a rich body of behavioral work demonstrating that infants are sensitive to motion-carried information from the early months of life, little is known about the cortical networks that support infants’ use of motion-carried information to extract 3-D object structure. This study assessed patterns of cortical activation in infants aged 4 to 6 months as they viewed two types of visual stimuli: (a) shape-from-motion (SFM) displays, where coherent motion of randomly distributed dots gave rise to the percept of 3-D shape and (b) random motion (RM) displays, where dots’ motions lacked a coherent structure and gave rise to the percept of randomly moving dots. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was used to assess activation in occipital, inferior parietal, and posterior temporal cortex. The optical imaging data revealed differential responding to SFM and RM in lower level object processing areas than typically observed in the adult. Possible explanations for this pattern of results are considered.

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Amy Hirshkowitz, Marisa Biondi, and Teresa Wilcox "Cortical responses to shape-from-motion stimuli in the infant," Neurophotonics 5(1), 011014 (11 October 2017). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.NPh.5.1.011014

Received: 1 April 2017; Accepted: 1 September 2017; Published: 11 October 2017

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