PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Laura Cabral
AU  - Leire Zubiaurre
AU  - Conor Wild
AU  - Annika Linke
AU  - Rhodri Cusack
TI  - Category-Selective Visual Regions Have Distinctive Signatures of Connectivity in Early Infancy
AID  - 10.1101/675421
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 675421
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/20/675421.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/20/675421.full
AB  - By four months, infants can form categories of similar looking objects, but it is unclear when they begin to make the rich cross-modal, motoric and affective associations that are characteristic of adult visual categories. These associations are thought to be encoded by long-range brain connectivity and are reflected in the distinctive signature of connectivity of each category-selective region in the ventral visual stream. Category-selective ventral visual regions are already functioning in young infants, but their long-range connectivity has not been investigated. Therefore we used MRI diffusion tractography to characterize the connectivity of face, place and tool regions in 1-9 month infants. Using a linear discriminant classifier, we found that the face and place regions had adult-like connectivity throughout infancy, but the tool-network underwent significant maturation until 9 months. This suggests that young infants might already be forming rich associations, but that different categories are maturing with different developmental trajectories.