Thaindian News

London, Sep 25 (IANS) Do infants only start to crawl once they are able to see impending danger? Their ability to see whether an object is approaching on a direct collision course and when it is likely to collide, develops around the time they become more mobile, says a new study.
The study, conducted by Ruud van der Weel and Audrey van der Meer from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NUST) at Trondheim, investigated how, and where, the infant brain extracts and processes information about imminent collision.

An approaching object on a collision course projects an expanding image on the retina, providing information that the object is approaching and how imminent the danger is. Looming stimuli create waves of neural activity in the visual cortex in adults.

The researchers used high-density electroencephalography (ECG) to measure brain activity in 18 five-to 11-month-old infants, when a growing multi-coloured dot on a screen (the looming stimulus) approached the infants at three different speeds. The researchers also recorded the gaze of both eyes.

They found that infants’ looming-related brain activity clearly took place in the visual cortex. The more mature infants (10 to 11-months-old) were able to process the information more quickly than the younger infants aged five to seven months.

These findings suggest that there are well-established neural networks for registering impending collision in the first group, but not yet in second group. For the eight- to nine-month-old infants, they are somewhere in between.

“As infants gain better control of self-produced locomotion, their perceptual abilities for sensing looming danger improve,” the authors concluded, according to a NUST release.

Their findings were published online in the Springer journal Naturwissenschaften.