Fig. 2: Visual representations from infancy to adulthood.
From: Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age
The group average, across-subject pairwise correlation distance between voxelwise patterns from EVC and VVC in response to each object. Aggregated ROIs were defined using individual regions from the Julich atlas that have been validated to overlap with functionally defined regions. Conditions within the RSMs are nested by animacy class (animate, inanimate-small and inanimate-large), then category (four per animacy class) and, finally, exemplar (three per category). To focus on representational content rather than strength, we plotted the z-scored correlation distance. Raw group mean correlation ranges varied with age: 2-month EVC = (−0.027 to 0.030) and VVC = (−0.0082 to 0.0078); 9-month EVC = (−0.054 to 0.073) and VVC = (−0.030 to 0.045); adult EVC = (−0.112 to 0.142) and VVC = (−0.046 to 0.068). Violin plots show the bootstrap distribution of RSM correlation to a model that codes for within-object versus between-object similarity, implemented as an identity matrix. The violin is a symmetric kernel density estimate of the bootstrap distribution across all subject/run pair RSMs (2 months (n = 101): 14,108 unique subject/run pairs, 9 months (n = 44): 1,995 unique subject/run pairs; adults (n = 17): 136 unique subject/run pairs). The white dot is the median; the black bar is the IQR; and the whiskers denote 1.5 × IQR of the lower and upper quantiles. Correlations were normalized by the split-half noise ceiling for each ROI/age. ROIs are plotted from the atlas transformed into age-specific templates. mo, months old.
