Visual functions, such as the perception of motion direction, start to develop soon after birth and continue to mature over time as infants gain more experience with the world. However, direct evidence of how this maturation process unfolds in the brain has been lacking because there has been no functional imaging study testing very young infants while awake and visually engaged. A new study publishing in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology on September 29th provides for the first time a direct window into the maturation of vision-related areas of the cortex in the first weeks of life, showing that the visual brain of 7-week-old babies is surprisingly mature.
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