For more than a century, psychologists thought that the infant experience was, as the psychologist and philosopher William James famously put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” But new research suggests babies are born with a surprisingly sophisticated neurological toolkit that can organize the visual world into categories and pick out the beat in a song.
In the first of two new studies, neuroscientists managed a rare feat: performing functional MRI (fMRI) scans on more than 100 awake 2-month-old infants to see how their brains categorize visual objects. fMRI requires near-stillness, which makes scanning babies notoriously difficult. While the infants lay in the machines, images of animals, food, household objects