The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience
Frederik S. Kamps, Emily M. Chen, Haoyu Du, Heather L. Kosakowski, Ariel Fuchs, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe · 2026
Read The cortical scene processing network emerges in infancy, prior to independent navigation experience by Frederik S. Kamps, Emily M. Chen, Haoyu Du, Heather L. Kosakowski, Ariel Fuchs, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13439116.txt.
Description
Frederik S Kamps and colleagues ask when the brain's scene network first appears, reporting infant brain scans in a 2026 study. Adults hold three cortical areas that respond strongly to places and layouts, supporting recognition and wayfinding. How early those areas specialise was unknown. The team scanned awake babies aged 2 to 9 months while checking their daily visual experience at home.
All three areas already favoured scenes over other images in the babies tested. That selectivity showed up before crawling and before any real practice at steering through space by sight. Passive looking at the visual world may therefore shape the network more than active travel does. The result narrows theories of how high-level vision is built in the first year of life.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Frederik S. Kamps, Emily M. Chen, Haoyu Du, Heather L. Kosakowski, Ariel Fuchs, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 58 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |