The development of category specificity in infancy--What can we learn from electrophysiology?

Abstract

In this review I address the question why relatively little is currently known about the neural bases of category learning and beginning category identification in infancy. Electrophysiological research on infants' basic-level and global-level categorization has mainly focused on general measures of visual attention, not on specific neural processes underlying the development and identification of visual categories. Our knowledge on categorization processes in the infant brain is mainly limited to faces as categories. I will call for the use of EEG-based techniques such as rapid repetition ERP paradigms and fast periodic stimulation that have only rarely been used with infants in order to gain a better understanding of the development of category representations in the infant brain.

Keywords: Categorization; ERP; Faces; Infancy.