Neural Sensitivity to Natural Image Statistics Changes during Middle Childhood

Abstract

Natural images have lawful statistical properties that the adult visual system is sensitive to, both in terms of behavior and neural responses to natural images. The developmental trajectory of sensitivity to natural image statistics remains unclear, however. In behavioral tasks, children appear to slowly acquire adult-like sensitivity to natural image statistics during middle childhood (Ellemberg et al., 2012), but in other tasks, infants exhibit some sensitivity to deviations of natural image structure (Balas & Woods, 2014). Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how sensitivity to natural image statistics changes during childhood at distinct stages of visual processing (the P1 and N1 components). We asked children (5-10 years old) and adults to view natural texture images with either positive/negative contrast, and natural/synthetic texture appearance (Portilla & Simoncelli, 2000) to compare electrophysiological responses to images that did or did not violate natural statistics. We hypothesized that children may only acquire sensitivity to these deviations from natural texture appearance late in middle childhood. Counter to this hypothesis, we observed significant responses to unnatural contrast and texture statistics at the N1 in all age groups. At the P1, however, only young children exhibited sensitivity to contrast polarity. The latter effect suggests greater sensitivity earlier in development to some violations of natural image statistics. We discuss these results in terms of changing patterns of invariant texture processing during middle childhood and ongoing refinement of the representations supporting natural image perception.