1/ Excited to be at #VSS2026 soon! Come to my #VSS talk (Sun, 3pm) and #MODVIS talk (Thu, 9:30am) to hear about Gestalt grouping in children treated for blindness late in life, and developmentally inspired deep networks!

This paper was an awesome collaborative effort of a @fitngin.bsky.social working group. It provides a detailed review of how DNNs can be used to support dev neuro research @lauriebayet.bsky.social and I wrote the network modeling section about how DNNs can be used to test developmental theories 🧵

Deep learning in fetal, infant, and toddler neuroimaging research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into everyday tasks and work environments. However, its adoption in medical image analys…

sciencedirect.com

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Thanks to fellow defenders @clionaod.bsky.social, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, and @charvetcj.bsky.social Defending the foundation model view of infant development www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Defending the foundation model view of infant development

sciencedirect.com

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children

The visual recognition abilities of preschool children rival those of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models.

doi.org

Excited to share our new review in #AnnualReviews Psychology on the role of time in perceptual organization! doi.org/10.1146/annu...

The Temporal Scaffolding of Sensory Organization

How a developing nervous system discovers meaning in complex sensory inputs has typically been examined separately for each sensory modality. Even as studies have uncovered modality-specific strategie...

doi.org

Looking forward to #CCN2025! Please come say hi! On Monday, as part of the ‘From Child to Machine Learning’ Satellite sites.google.com/view/child2m... (3-6pm), I look forward to give a talk about our past work probing the hypothesis that visual degradations in early development may be adaptive.

CCN 2025 Satellite Event

Background The human visual system is full of optimisations—mechanisms designed to extract the most useful information from a constant stream of incoming data. The field of neuro-AI has made significa...

sites.google.com

1/ New paper out in @commsbio.nature.com, led by @marinv.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1038/s420...! Across several past studies, we showed how newborns' degraded vision may benefit human development and inspire more robust deep networks. We have referred to this as Adaptive Initial Degradations (AID).

Potential role of developmental experience in the emergence of the parvo-magno distinction - Communications Biology

Developmentally-driven computational modeling study suggests that early sensory experience shapes distinct neuronal response properties in the visual system, providing a potential account of the emerg...

doi.org