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Visual context modulates the categorization of facelike visual stimuli in the young infant brain

par Bourgaux, Laura ;Rekow, Diane DR;Leleu, Arnaud AL;De Heering, Adélaïde
Référence International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS) (XXIV: 8-11/07/2024: Glasgow, Scotland)
Publication Non publié, 2024-07-11

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Résumé :

Face pareidolia is the illusory perception of a face in ambiguous objects or patterns (e.g., clouds depicting a face shape; Wardle et al., 2020), as reflected by face-selective electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in both adults (Rekow et al., 2022a) and infants (Rekow et al., 2021). However, the perceptual interpretation of these facelike stimuli depends on the context in which they are presented (Rekow et al., 2022b; Bourgaux et al., in prep). Indeed, we recently developed a paradigm using a frequency-tagging approach – which allows for short and efficient recordings, has an excellent signal-to-noise ratio and is immune to most artifacts (Kabdebon et al., 2022; de Heering & Rossion, 2015) – to address this issue (Bourgaux et al., in prep) and we found that, in adults, face-like stimuli are more interpreted as faces in a non-face context and as non-face objects in a face context. Accordingly, here, we aim to explore how visual context shapes the perception of these facelike stimuli early in life. We thus measured scalp EEG activity in 4-to-6 months-old infants who were exposed to 20-second stimulation sequences of natural images presented at a rate of 6 images per second (6 Hz), with facelike items inserted every 5th image (at 1.2 Hz), and face or house items inserted every 4th image (at 1.5 Hz) in dedicated sequences, defining a visual face or non-face context, respectively. Preliminary data (N = 10 infants) reveal that the brain response to facelike stimuli is present in the young infant brain although weaker in amplitude than in adults. In addition, contrary to the adult responses, the infant response is also more face-like in the face context (with a typical occipito-temporal location of the response, as in Rekow et al., 2021) and shifts to a more occipital response in the non-face context. While these preliminary results still need to be consolidated (recruitment is ongoing), they suggest that the influence of visual context on the categorization of ambiguous, facelike stimuli changes throughout development, likely due to the effectiveness of perception at a given developmental stage.