Orientation discrimination and cortical function in the human newborn |
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Authors: | A Slater V Morison M Somers |
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Affiliation: | Department of Psychology, Washington Singer Laboratories, University of Exeter, UK. |
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Abstract: | There is some controversy concerning whether or not the visual abilities of the newborn are mediated entirely through subcortical pathways or whether the visual cortex is functioning at birth. A critical test of cortical functioning is discrimination of orientation: orientation-selective neurons are found in the visual cortex but not in subcortical parts of the visual system. An experiment is described in which newborn infants were habituated to a square-wave grating oriented 45 degrees from vertical. After habituation, significant preferences for the novel, mirror-image, grating were found, a result which argues for some degree of visual cortical functioning at birth. |
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