Evidence of Top‐Down Sensory Prediction in Neonates Within 2 Days of Birth
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent studies have demonstrated top-down modulation in perceptual cortices in infants as young as 6 months. However, it is unclear when and how this ability emerges given conflicting evidence available. This study investigates top-down perceptual modulation by focusing on a neural signature referred to as top-down sensory prediction, where the prediction of upcoming sensory information is exhibited in the modulation of activity in perceptual cortices. We extended a paradigm previously used to identify top-down sensory prediction in 6-month-old infants to neonates. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we monitored occipital lobe activity in sleeping neonates held by their caregivers. The study consisted of a Learning session, where neonates were exposed to a novel auditory-visual stimulus combination (A+V+), followed by sessions presenting occasional visual stimulus omissions (A+V-). Results showed that fNIRS channels over the occipital lobe, which were active during the Learning session, also responded to the unexpected visual omissions, indicating neonatal brains' capability for top-down sensory prediction. Experiment 2 confirmed that this response depended on learning the audiovisual association, ruling out non-specific mechanisms such as heightened arousal or an increase in the visual response when a non-specific auditory stimulus is presented. These findings offer the first evidence of top-down modulation of visual responses in neonates, suggesting this capacity exists at birth, significantly earlier than previously thought. This study suggests that top-down predictive processing is crucial for early perceptual and cognitive development.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it