Hemodynamic changes in the infant cortex during the processing of featural and spatiotemporal information

Over the last 20 years neuroscientists have learned a great deal about the ventral and dorsal object processing pathways in the adult brain, yet little is known about the functional development of these pathways. The present research assessed the extent to which different patterns of neural activation, as measured by changes in blood volume and oxygenation, are observed in infant visual and temporal cortex in response to events that involve processing of featural differences or spatiotemporal discontinuities. Infants aged 6.5 months were tested. Increased neural activation was observed in visual cortex in response to a featural-difference and a spatiotemporal-discontinuity event. In addition, increased neural activation was observed in temporal cortex in response to the featural-difference but not the spatiotemporal-discontinuity event. The outcome of this experiment reveals early functional specialization of temporal cortex and lays the foundation for future investigation of the maturation of object processing pathways in humans.