| Publications of year 2026 |
| Articles in journals |
| Abstract: | In the first months postterm, human infants are traditionally viewed as passive to their environment, unable to focus or sustain attention on specific objects. Here, we asked whether 4-mo-old infants could engage their attention strongly enough in a visual task to block the perception of a subsequent interesting stimulus--a phenomenon known as attentional blink, which in adults reflects a serial processing bottleneck for accessing a central workspace. We presented three successive visual events: a central teddy bear (T1) followed by a lateralized face and scrambled face (T2) at varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOAs: 400, 800, and 1,200 ms), then the same face reappeared after 1,600 ms (T3). We monitored saccades toward the face, pupil size, and electroencephalic (EEG) responses to the flickering background. Our behavioral and EEG results showed that infants missed the lateralized face at the shortest SOA (400 ms). At 800 ms, detection occurred only when the face appeared in the left hemifield, while detection in the right hemifield required 1,200 ms, suggesting a hemispheric asymmetry in face processing. Furthermore, at SOAs where T2 should be visible, a trial-by-trial metric based on event-related variability revealed that the depth of attentional engagement to T1 predicted access to T2, despite identical visual input. These findings support the presence of a global workspace in early infancy, though with slower dynamics. |
| Abstract: | The perception and production of regular geometric shapes, a characteristic trait of human cultures since prehistory, has unknown neural mechanisms. Behavioral studies suggest that humans are attuned to discrete regularities such as symmetries and parallelism and rely on their combinations to encode regular geometric shapes in a compressed form. To identify the brain systems underlying this ability, as well as their dynamics, we collected functional MRI in both adults and 6-year-olds, and magnetoencephalography data in adults, during the perception of simple shapes such as hexagons, triangles, and quadrilaterals. The results revealed that geometric shapes, relative to other visual categories, induce a hypoactivation of ventral visual areas and an overactivation of the intraparietal and inferior temporal regions also involved in mathematical processing, whose activation is modulated by geometric regularity. While convolutional neural networks captured the early visual activity evoked by geometric shapes, they failed to account for subsequent dorsal parietal and prefrontal signals, which could only be captured by discrete geometric features or by bigger deep-learning models of vision. We propose that the perception of abstract geometric regularities engages an additional symbolic mode of visual perception. |
This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All person copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Note that this is not the exhaustive list of publications, but only a selection. Contact the individual authors for complete lists of references.
This document was translated from BibTEX by bibtex2html