Brain Responses to Symmetry during Early Infancy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Animal species from across the phylogenetic tree are highly sensitive to visual symmetries in their surroundings. In humans, psychophysical experiments have demonstrated that symmetry is an important cue to perceptual organization, and brain imaging experiments have measured robust and precise responses to different types of symmetry in visual brain areas. Is sensitivity to symmetry innate or does it arise over visual development due to exposure to symmetries in the visual environment? Leverage can be gained on this question by testing whether infants display sensitivity to symmetry – if not, sensitivity clearly arises at a later stage of visual development. There is behavioral evidence for reflection symmetry sensitivity in infants, primarily using preferential-looking paradigms (e.g., Humphreys & Humphreys, 1989). Here we used high-density EEG to measure symmetry responses from 3-month-old infants. Our stimuli were a class of regular textures known as wallpaper groups – a set of 17 unique combinations of symmetry types. We focus on two groups that prominently feature reflection and rotation symmetries, respectively. We use a Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (Norcia et al., 2015) paradigm that allows us to isolate brain responses that are driven by the symmetries in our textures (see Kohler et al., 2016). We see evidence of symmetry-specific responses over visual cortex which are broadly similar to those we observe in adults. Importantly, we see such responses for both reflection and rotation. We are unaware of any prior evidence of sensitivity to rotation symmetry in infants. Reflection is prominent in the visual world of infants and tied to important stimuli (e.g., faces). This is not true for rotation. The presence of brain responses to rotation symmetry at this early stage of visual development seems to offer especially strong evidence against the hypothesis that symmetry sensitivity arises due to exposure to symmetries in the visual world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".