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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Apr 29, 2026

Optimized Ex-ovo Culturing of Chick Embryos to Advanced Stages of Development

Optimized Ex-ovo Culturing of Chick Embryos to Advanced Stages of Development

Published on: January 24, 2015

Newly hatched chicks solve the visual binding problem.

Justin N Wood¹

¹University of Southern California justin.wood@usc.edu.

Psychological Science

|May 21, 2014

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Newborn chicks can integrate visual features like color and shape into a unified object representation. This demonstrates that the ability to bind visual information begins at the very start of an organism's experience.

Keywords:

avian cognition binding controlled rearing imprinting object recognition visual memory

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Last Updated: Apr 29, 2026

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Area of Science:

Developmental psychology
Cognitive neuroscience
Visual perception

Background:

Organisms need to bind visual features like color and shape for object perception.
The origins of this feature-binding ability in early development are not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether newborns can form integrated color-shape representations of objects.
To determine if feature binding occurs at the onset of visual experience.

Main Methods:

Newly hatched chicks (Gallus gallus) were raised in controlled environments with a single virtual object.
The virtual object continuously rotated, displaying different color and shape combinations on its faces.

Main Results:

Chicks demonstrated the ability to build integrated object representations.
They could differentiate between objects with swapped color-shape pairings (e.g., purple circle/yellow triangle vs. purple triangle/yellow circle).

Conclusions:

Newborns can bind visual features like color and shape into coherent object representations.
This capacity for feature binding emerges at the very beginning of visual object experience.