At two months of age, infants lack language and fine motor control but their minds may be understanding how things look and figuring out to which category they belong, which would push back earlier beliefs about the foundations of visual cognition.
A new study recruited 130 two-month-old infants who were placed on a beanbag chair wearing sound-canceling headphones, while shown bright, colorful images which kept them engaged for 15-20 minutes. The team used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure changes in brain activity in response to pictures representing 12 common visual categories such as cat, bird, rubber duck, shopping cart and tree.