Neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have found that babies as young as two months old can already sort visual information into categories like animals and toys. Using brain scans and AI, the study reveals early foundations of perception. This challenges previous assumptions about infant cognition.
New research published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrates that infants begin organizing the world around them much sooner than expected. Led by Dr. Cliona O'Doherty at Trinity College Dublin's Cusack Lab, the study involved 130 two-month-old babies from Dublin's Coombe and Rotunda Hospitals. Each infant underwent functional MRI (fMRI) scans while lying on a soft beanbag, wearing sound-cancelling headphones, and viewing colorful images from 12 categories, including cats, birds, rubber ducks, shopping carts, and trees. The sessions lasted 15-20 minutes to maintain attention.
Researchers combined these brain activity patterns with artificial intelligence models to decode how infants represent and categorize visuals. "Although at two months, infants' communication is limited by a lack of language and fine motor control, their minds were already not only representing how things look, but figuring out to which category they belonged," Dr. O'Doherty explained. This marks the largest longitudinal fMRI study of awake infants to date.
Team leader Rhodri Cusack, Thomas Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Trinity, highlighted the broader applications: "This study... opens up a whole new way to measure what babies are thinking at a very early age. It also highlights the potential for neuroimaging and computational models to be used as a diagnostic tool in very young infants." Co-author Anna Truzzi, now at Queen's University Belfast, noted how recent advances in AI and neuroimaging enabled these insights into the first year of rapid brain development.
The findings could guide early-years education, support for neurodevelopmental conditions, and more efficient AI designs. Neonatologist Eleanor Molloy emphasized the need to understand disorders affecting early brain growth, where awake fMRI shows promise. The work, detailed in a 2026 Nature Neuroscience paper (DOI: 10.1038/s41593-025-02187-8), underscores the richness of infant brain function from the outset.
